Red Grass River: A Legend

RED GRASS RIVER A LEGEND

James Carlos Blake

For Len Richardson a good old boy and damn fine man… and the coterie of my Bowling Green days: Fare ye well, gents and ladies, each and all.

As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more. —Psalms, 103:15 The terrible thing is, everyone has his reasons. —Jean Renoir

CONTENTS

EPIGRAPH

ix

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ix

PROLOGUE

1

ONE THE BOY POLED THE SKIFF ALONG THE WINDING SAWGRASS CHANNEL

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TWO SHE WAS A BOBHAIRED SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD BLONDE WITH FULL breasts and

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THREE FOLLOWING HIS RELEASE FROM THE PALM BEACH COUNTY JAIL he

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FOUR OLD JOE ASHLEY’S DADDY COME TO FLORIDA AS A YOUNG MAN

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FIVE THE GALVESTON SUMMERS WERE HOT AND WET AND LITTLE DIFFERent

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SIX ON A CLEAR HOT SUMMER SUNDAY JUST DAYS AFTER JOHN

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SEVEN MIAMI WASNT BUT ABOUT FIFTEEN, SIXTEEN YEARS OLD WHEN THE

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EIGHT FOLLOWING HIS ESCAPE FROM BOBBY BAKER HE SENT MOST OF HIS

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NINE THEY GOT OUT OF THE CAR AT THE BEND IN

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TEN THE DOCTOR WAS A HEAVYSET BEARDED MAN NAMED BOYER. WITH

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ELEVEN THERE WASNT ANYBODY TO GET EVEN WITH, THAT WAS OLD

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TWELVE THEY RAN THROUGH THE PINE SCRUBS TO WHERE ED AND

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THIRTEEN ON NEW YEAR’S DAY BILL ASHLEY AND HIS PRETTY BUT

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FOURTEEN ONE WARM FORENOON IN LATE APRIL JOHN ASHLEY AND HANFORD

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FIFTEEN LORDY, THE STORIES WE HEARD ABOUT JOHN AND LAURA! THE

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SIXTEEN THE ELSER PIER WAS AN ORNATE THREE-STORY BUILDING THAT stood

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SEVENTEEN OVER THE NEXT FOUR MONTHS THEY HIJACKED NEARLY OF DOZEN

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EIGHTEEN

231

A FEW MONTHS AFTER JOHN WENT BACK TO PRISON ED NINETEEN HE WAS LOCKED INTO A SEVEN-BY-NINE CELL IN A SPECIAL

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TWENTY THEY HIT THE STUART BANK FIVE MINUTES AFTER IT OPENED

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TWENTY-ONE THE RUMOR WAS EVERYWHERE THAT OLD JOE ASHLEY’D HAD A

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TWENTY-TWO THEY TRIED HARD TO BELAY THEIR DESIRE UNTIL NIGHTFALL BUT

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TWENTY-THREE CHILL WINTER DAWN. THE EASTERN SKY SHOWING GRAY AT THE

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TWENTY-FOUR BOBBY BAKER’S RAID ON THE ASHLEY CAMP MADE HEADLINES THAT

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TWENTY-FIVE HE FISHED AND HUNTED AND HE TOOK HIDES OF ALL

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TWENTY-SIX THEY DISEMBARKED IN KEY WEST AND MADE INQUIRIES AND found

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TWENTY-SEVEN BY THE TIME ELMER PADGETT, SLEEPLESS AND HAGGARD, HAD tracked

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TWENTY-EIGHT

369

THE FIRST ANYBODY HEARD ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED WAS WHEN A TWENTY-NINE A GUSTY GRAY EVENING OF UNSEASONABLE RAIN A FEW DAYS BEFORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR PRAISE OTHER BOOKS BY JAMES CARLOS BLAKE COVER COPYRIGHT ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

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Author’s Note The Ashley Gang is a historical reality. Most of the characters in this novel did exist, and most of its major events did take place. Still, this is a work of fiction, and those familiar with the facts about the Ashleys and the Florida of their time will discern the liberties I’ve taken with the record.

PROLOGUE The Liars Club

IF THE DEVIL EVER RAISED A GARDEN THE EVERGLADES WAS IT. THE biggest and meanest swamp you’re ever like to see—bigger than some entire states of the Union—it’s pineywoods and palmetto scrubs and cypress heads and tangled vines but mostly it’s a river, a river like no other on this earth. It’s sixty miles wide and half-a-foot deep and runs from Lake Okeechobee to the south end of the state over a layer of muck thats got no bottom. The whole thing covered with sawgrass sharp as a skinning razor. Not a thing else in that sawgrass country but here and there some hammocks—highground islands of hardwoods and palms—and most of them never been set foot on. Out there the world looks a whole lot bigger and there’s no end at all to the sky. They say it’s hardly another place in the world where you can look farther and see less. And all of it green of one shade or another except at sunrise and in the dying light of day when that great grass river goes so red it looks like it’s on fire or stained with blood. Only the godawful desperate or the plain goddamned could ever live out there. It’s ever kind of thing in the Everglades to cut you or burn you or itch you or sting you or poison you or eat you up whole. It’s quicksand and gators and panthers and snakes and mosquitoes and ever sort of bug in hell to drive you insane. In summer the air’s so hot and wet it’s like trying to breathe boiled cotton. Lord only knows whatall’s been swallowed up in that rotten ooze under the sawgrass and won’t never again see the light of day. It’s bones in that muck a

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million years old and bones aint been there a week. Animal bones. Bones of men. It’s ten thousand stories buried out there aint nobody heard but the devil. Yessir, the Devil’s Garden was as right a name as was ever give to any place there is. Even on today’s maps you’ll see the name on a portion of wildland just east of Immokalee. It was the early crackers who come up with the name—and big as the Glades is now, in them days it was even bigger and took in most of the region to either side of Lake Okeechobee. A cracker is somebody who grows up in the swamp country and provided his daily bread mostly by hunting and trapping, though some did a little hardscrabble farming, some a little cattle ranching, some a little of it all. The first of them to show up in Florida come from all over the South but most of them from Georgia. They got their name on account of the sound their whips made as they drove their stock ahead of them. Some of them latigo whips was so big they had to hold them with both hands. They cracked loud as rifleshots and you could hear them from miles away. No white people ever knew the ways of the Devil’s Garden better than the crackers. And no crackers knew them better than the Ashleys. It’s only a few of us oldtime crackers left anymore who go back that far and knew the Ashleys in the living flesh. I mean we’re old, the bunch of us, old and aching ever kind of way and all of us needing a cane at the least and a couple of us a damn walker. Hardly a man among us dont wear specs as thick as bottle glass, or says “What?” ever time somebody says something to him, or can sleep through the night without having to get up a time or two to piss. But near all of us knew the Ashleys when we was kids, leastways knew them well enough to say “Howdo” to and get a “Hey” in return, which was about as well as anybody who wasnt kin ever got to know an Ashley. They was a clannish family and hard to get to know personal, but we all of us saw one or another of them ever now and then, and we heard talk about them all the time. We grew up hearing a hundred stories about the Ashleys and about John Ashley’s gang and the crimes they did. We heard all about the bad blood between John Ashley and Bobby Baker and about the war the Ashleys had with Yankee bootleggers who tried to cut in on their territory. We heard a dozen versions of what happened at the Sebastian River Bridge when the gang was finally put to an end. We still tell them stories ever time we get together in the park to sun our old bones and pass the time and talk about something other than whether there’s a Democrat alive who can win the next election.

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The thing is, so many stories about the Ashley Gang have been told for so long by so many who have bent the facts so many ways that there’s hardly no way of knowing anymore what’s the true facts and what aint. It probly dont really matter all that much. Everybody knows that the plain and simple facts about something dont necessarily tell the truth of it. Some people can lie all day long with nothing but the facts, and what goes on in most courtrooms is proof enough of that. On the other hand, sometimes a story that stretches a fact here and there can tell more of the real truth of a thing as you’re ever like to get. Leastways thats what the bunch of us think. Our growed-up children tend to smile and wink at each other and shake their heads at the tales we tell, but there’s been a bunch of old farts like us in barbershops and cafes and courthouse squares in ever town there ever was. That’s for damn sure the way of it down South. Back when we was pups a bunch of graybeards used to sit around in the town square and tell stories about the War Between the States and the bad old days of Reconstruction and the doings of the Klan and such. Everybody used to call to call those oldtimers the Liars Club. And it’s what everybody calls us too….

ONE December 1911

THE BOY POLED THE SKIFF ALONG THE WINDING SAWGRASS CHANNEL and heard now a faint chanting through the bird cries from the hardwood hammock just ahead. He knew it was the Indian come to meet him and that he was drunk and not alone. He let the pushpole trail alongside the skiff and considered his circumstance as the boat glided slowly through the sawgrass that stood higher than his head. His father always said a drunk Indian could be the easiest delivery in a day’s work or the most troublesome, depending on the Indian. The boy knew this Indian for the troublesome sort. But if he shied from making the delivery just because you never knew what a drunk Indian might do his father would mock him for a nancy forever. He spat into the sawgrass and leaned into the pole and pushed the skiff ahead, feeling the comforting press of the revolver at his back where it was tucked in his waistband under his loose shirt. His name was John Ashley and he was eighteen years old. In the west the high enpurpling sky showed streaks of orange and reefs of red clouds flanking the lowering sun. To southeastward rose a high black column of boiler smoke where a dredge was digging a canal. This earlywinter’s day had begun dry and almost cool but had since assumed a hint of unseasonable rain. The air was sweet with the smell of swampwater and vegetation, with the redolence of the approaching hammock’s ripe earth under the canopy of magnolia and gumbo limbo trees. Even if there had been some elevated vantage point

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as near as fifty yards of him from which an observer might scan the vast encircling vista of sawgrass and scattered hardwood hammocks and pine islands (and the only such vantage points were the tops of the hammock trees where at this hour the birds were coming to clamorous roost), the observer would not have spied either the channel or his movement through it, so high was the grass and so narrow the waterway and so smoothly did he navigate it. Only a circling fish hawk high overhead bore witness to his progress. The Indians’ chanting ceased as he poled into the shadowed green light under the heavy hardwood overhang and the sawgrass fell away and the canoe carried into the natural moat of copper-colored water that girt the hammock. The roosting birds were quieting now. Their droppings shook leaves on the lower branches, flashed whitely to the ground, poked ripples in the pool. The hammock rang with the croaking of frog colonies. He made toward a rough-sloped mudbank where the root vegetation had been hacked away to shape a landing for canoes. He smelled the Indians before he caught sight of them in their baggy white shirts and black bowler hats on the higher ground in the darkness of the trees. Two of them. Sitting crosslegged and watching him and passing a jug between them. At the edge of the landing a single long dugout was tethered to a jutting root and now the scent of the otter skins piled within carried to him under the smell of the Indians. The water surface shattered lightly as a school of fingerlings broke away from a rushing bass. He pulled hard on the pole and the prow bumped up onto the muddy landing and the skiff’s abrupt halt shook the wooden cases nestled toward the bow and there was a clinking of jug on jug. The smaller of the Indians grinned whitely. Mosquitoes raged at the boy’s ears. A gray haze of them quivered about the Indians’ heads without settling on their skins. He spotted a shotgun propped against a tree behind the Indians but saw only knives on their belts. “We been hearin you from a mile off,” the bigger Indian said. His voice was wetly raw. “Been hearin you comin like a fucken steamboat.” John Ashley doubted that. This big one—whose name was DeSoto Tiger and who resold to other Indians in the deeper Glades most of the moonshine he bought from the boy’s father—was said by some to be a good man who took after his daddy and his uncle, both of whom were chiefs in local Seminole tribes. But John Ashley knew him for a mean drunk and had for years heard terrible stories about him. He

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was said to have beaten a wife to death for infidelity and to have cut the dick off the man who put the horns on him. He was said to have drowned a Negro in a creek for trying to steal his traps. The boy’s father had told him that most of those stories were lies DeSoto Tiger had himself concocted to keep other Indians in fear of him. But other white men believed the big Indian was every bit the bad actor his reputation held. John Ashley had known him only to nod to until almost a year ago when he and his daddy had come on him one day at Blue’s store on Lake Towhee and the Indian asked the boy if he wanted to go for alligator hides in the Okaloosa sloughs with him on shares. He said he wanted a white partner so he could get a better price for the hides on the New River trading dock and he’d heard the boy was a good enough skinner to go shares with. John Ashley had turned to his father who affected to study the clouds in the distance. He did not really want to work shares with the Indian but he wanted to show his father he was not afraid of DeSoto Tiger. He told the Indian he’d do it if he would agree to take no whiskey on the hunt. His daddy had smiled without looking their way and DeSoto Tiger laughed and said that was fine, he anyway never drank when he was working. They’d gone south with a string of four empty dugouts and over the next fortnight killed gators through the nights and skinned the carcasses through the mornings and slept through the afternoons and did not talk much the whole time. They piled three of the dugouts high with hides and another with the tailmeat, which they could readily sell in the Negro parts of town. En route to the trading docks they came upon a whiskey peddler and the Indian bought a quart bottle. John Ashley gave him a look and the Indian said, “Hell, boy, the work’s done.” When they arrived at the New River trading post DeSoto Tiger was drunk. Their boat no sooner bumped up to the dock than the Indian spied a tribesman named Henry Little Bear who he believed had been trying to steal his sweetheart’s affections. A loud row ensued and knives came into play and it required several dockhands to subdue the big Indian and hold him until the police arrived and took him away to jail. Henry Little Bear was sopping with blood as he was borne to the nearest doctor with his belly gashed and most of his nose missing and half his face flensed to the skull. Like the other witnesses John Ashley had been impressed by DeSoto Tiger’s spectacular proficiency with a knife. For the next few days the talk on the docks was

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of little else but the Indian fight. The boy sold the hides and put aside the Indian’s half of the proceeds. Because Henry Little Bear didnt die but had only been mutilated—and because DeSoto Tiger’s father and uncle were chiefs in the regional Seminole confederation and often proved of assistance to the white authorities in their Indian dealings—and because the law didnt much care what Indians did to each other anyway as long as they didnt disturb decent white folk by it, DeSoto Tiger was obliged to serve but ten days in the county lockup. When the Indian got out of jail John Ashley retrieved his share of the gatorhide money and met him at Blue’s store and turned it over to him. DeSoto Tiger stared at the money and then at the boy, his eyes hard with accusation. John Ashley took insult and told him he could check the price he’d got with Mister Williams, the hide buyer. The Indian said he knew better than to ask any white man for the truth. He spat on the ground between them and stuffed the money in his pocket and stalked away. They did not see each other again until three months ago when the boy’s father sent him to make delivery to this hammock in the sawgrass country southeast of Lake Okeechobee, one of several waycamps DeSoto Tiger was reputed to have in the region. Although John Ashley had told none but his brother Bob of the Indian’s accusation that he’d cheated him, his father seemed aware that his brief partnership with DeSoto Tiger had not concluded well, and yet sent him to deliver to the Indian anyway, maybe for that reason. His father wasn’t one to explain his actions but he’d always told John Ashley and his brothers that the only way to deal with bulls of any sort was to take them by the horns. The boy had been apprehensive on that first delivery but the big Indian had affected remoteness and made no mention of the last time they’d seen each other and their transaction was brief and without incident. Thus had they carried on in every meeting since and the boy was content to have it that way. This was the first time the Indian had shown up drunk. John Ashley saw that the jug the Indians were hefting was not one of his father’s. He stepped out of the skiff and nodded at the jug in DeSoto Tiger’s crooked finger and said, “Hope you boys aint switchin to another supplier. We’d hate to lose you all’s business.” DeSoto Tiger stared at the jug as if he’d only just noticed it. The other Indian laughed and said hell no, they weren’t switching, they’d found the jug just laying there in the scrub. The Indians looked at each other and laughed. Shit, John Ashley thought, one drunk Indian’s bad enough and here I got two.

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“Hell, boy, we dont drink nothin but your daddy’s wyome,” the smaller Indian said, using the Indian word for whiskey. “Everbody knows Old Joe’s stuff is the goodest.” This one’s name was Jimmy Gopher and he was a halfbreed as much scorned by Indians as by whites. John Ashley knew him for a mediocre trapper and truckling friend to DeSoto Tiger. “We don’t buy no shine cept your daddy’s,” Jimmy Gopher said. He stood up and came to the skiff and peered at the two cases inside and grinned. John Ashley hefted each case in turn and set it on the ground and looked at DeSoto Tiger who still sat crosslegged. The Indian looked back at him for a long moment and then withdrew a clump of bills from inside his shirt and handed it up to Jimmy Gopher who passed it to the boy. The money was damp and pungent with the smell of Indian. John Ashley counted it carefully and then folded it neatly and put it in his pocket. “Well,” he said, turning to the skiff, “see you next month.” “Have a drink fore you go,” DeSoto Tiger said, and got to his feet as lightly as rising smoke. He stood a head taller than the boy who was himself nearly six feet. He wore his bowler tilted forward so the narrow brim shadowed his eyes. “Sorry,” John Ashley said, “but I got to get.” “Heard you sold a bunch a egret feathers to Burris’ Store in Palm Beach,” the big Indian said. “For good money.” John Ashley looked at him, then at Jimmy Gopher and then back at DeSoto Tiger. “I sell plumes sometimes,” he said. “Everybody knows that.” “Heard you took them birds over by Pahokee Slough,” DeSoto Tiger said. His face held no hint of fellowship. “Everybody know Pahokee Slough’s my bird ground. That’s what everbody knows.” Only now did John Ashley perceive that the Indian was drunker than he’d thought. He wished his brother Bob was with him. Bob always offered to come along on the deliveries to the Indians and John Ashley always said no, he could make the drops himself. And his daddy always looked at him from the head of the supper table and smiled. “Aint nobody got a deed to no rookery,” he said, showing a grin and instantly chiding himself for it. You aint scared of this sonofabitch, he told himself, dont even wonder if you are. The big Indian took a step toward him. “I wonder did you go shares with anybody in them feathers,” he said, “and I wonder how much did you cheat him on them.”

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Jimmy Gopher leaned on a tree, grinning, watching with bright eyes. He’d opened one of the shine jugs and was sipping from it off his elbow. DeSoto Tiger drew his knife from its belt sheath and affected to strop it on his shirtsleeve as he smiled thinly at John Ashley. The boy had a fleeting vision of Henry Little Bear weighted with his own bloody clothes as he was carried off the New River dock. He put his hand behind him and under his shirt and around the pistol grips. The Indian grinned and stepped nearer to the boy. “What you got there, whitedove? A bible? A weapon?” He took another step toward him and John Ashley pulled out the pistol, a single-action Colt .44, and cocked it and pointed it outstretched at DeSoto Tiger’s chest. “Quit right there,” he said. He’d never before pointed a loaded firearm at anyone but he had several times seen it done. He’d seen his first mankilling at age seven when Porter Longtree shot Morris Jones through the eye on the front steps of Kennison’s Store. There had long been bad blood between the two men and the general opinion of the killing was fairly summed up by John Ashley’s daddy when he said it couldnt have ended any other way and whichever of them got killed for sure had it coming. John Ashley had since witnessed other acts of bloodletting and seen other men killed and could not have named an acquaintance who had not. And now, pointing the .44 at DeSoto Tiger, he was pleased to feel no tremor in his gunhand even as he felt his pulse thumping in his dry throat. DeSoto Tiger raised his hands and said, “Whoa now, boy.” He laughed and said, “Dont you know when you being wolfed?” He lowered his hands and shook his head, still grinning. He looked at Jimmy Gopher whose smile had gone weak. “Boy thought we was serious.” Jimmy Gopher’s laugh was hollow. His eyes had gone skittish. John Ashley lowered the gun, still unsure of the moment. “We had you goin, huh?” the big Indian said. “Should see your face. Hell, I bet you’d jump five feet if I did this.” The Indian feinted with the knife and the boy jumped back and lost his footing on the slick landing and staggered into the water up to his knees and regained his balance and again pointed the gun at DeSoto Tiger. “Easy now,” DeSoto Tiger said, laughing and raising a placatory palm. “See how we got you goin? Hell, boy, we just funnin. You dont want to shoot somebody’s just funnin.” He stepped forward and put his hand out to John Ashley and said. “Come on out the water.” He gave his free hand to the Indian and DeSoto Tiger’s fingers

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locked around his wrist. Jimmy Gopher called “Hey Johnny” and as he turned to look at him the big one yanked him off-balance and he knew the knife was coming and he lunged sideways and felt the blade nick his neck. The big Indian’s hold was iron and the blade was on its backswing and all in the same instant the boy turned his head aside and shoved the pistol against the Indian and the knife cut through his cheek as he pulled the trigger. DeSoto Tiger grunted and fell away. The pistol blast raised a great wingbeating cloud of shrilling white egrets off the trees. John Ashley swung the pistol toward the tree where he’d seen the shotgun and saw that the gun was still there and he caught a flash of Jimmy Gopher’s white shirt as the Indian vanished into the deeper hardwoods. DeSoto Tiger was sitting in water to his chest with his hands clasped to his stomach, staring down at the blood rising darkly to the surface. John Ashley slogged up onto the bank and retrieved the Indians’ shotgun and took it to his skiff and laid it inside. Then heard an agitation of water behind him and turned to see DeSoto Tiger looming huge and brightly bloodstained at his belly, his face contorted with malice as he came with one hand clawing for him and the other brandishing the knife. John Ashley shot him in the chest and the Indian stopped short and took a step back and then started for him again and the boy fired into his face and the Indian’s head jerked and his bowler tumbled from his head and he did a wobbly sidestep and fell on the sloping bank and slid in the mud to the edge of the water and under the dark hole in his forehead his open eyes held no light at all. John Ashley felt of the cuts on his neck and cheek and neither was severe. He packed mud in the wounds to stanch the bleeding. A riot of sensations churned in his chest. He looked on the dead man and felt a confusing tangle of regret and exultation. Then said aloud: “Try to cut my head off. You damn well had it comin.” It took a while for his pounding heart to slow, his breathing to ease. He set the two cases of whiskey back in the skiff—and then paused to consider. He went to the Indians’ dugout and in the last light of day saw that the pelts were prime quality. They could not belong to a dead man nor to any who abandoned them. He brought the bow of the Indian dugout around and tied it to a stern ring on his skiff with a short length of line. He thought of going through DeSoto Tiger’s pockets but could not bring himself to touch the body. Then he was poling hard in the sawgrass channel and making away into a moonless night black as ink but for a blazing spangle of stars.

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Later that night the stars dimmed and then disappeared altogether behind a massing of clouds in which lightning at first shimmered soundlessly and then began to be trailed closely by low rumblings. The wind roused, gained force and began pushing hard against the sawgrass. The hammock palms tossed and clattered. The susurrous hardwoods swayed. An incandescent flash of lightning made a ghostly blue noon of the night and illuminated the shadowed corpse of DeSoto Tiger sprawled on the bank of the hammock with face up to the first sprinkles of rain, eyesockets freshly hollowed by a possum and teeming with ants at their ancient industry. Now lightning jagged across the sky and thunder blasted close behind and the rain came crashing down, shaking the sawgrass, pocking the water. Lightning branched blue-white across the black sky. The sawgrass quivered under the explosive thunder as the storm rolled hard into the Everglades. Rain fell in a steady torrent and the water rose on the bank and after a time the dead man bobbed off the ground and was borne slowly from the hammock and out into the sawgrass channel. The body carried on the winding current all through the night and all the next day and then for two days more until it debouched onto the Okeechobee Slough and in another two days arrived at a canal being dredged to Fort Lauderdale. The corpse bloated now, blackened and malodorous, faceless for having been fed upon by birds, its ears and fingers gone to garfish. Near noon of that day it was scooped up with a load of muck and the dredge operator saw the legs overhanging the crane bucket and he deposited the load on the bank and called to his fellows to come see what he found.

TWO February 1912

SHE WAS A BOBHAIRED SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD BLONDE WITH FULL breasts and smoothly round hips and a wide sensual mouth. And she was blind. She’d shown up at Miss Lillian’s house in the tenderloin district of West Palm Beach eight months ago in the company of a stranger named Benson who drove a brand new Model T. This Benson raised eyebrows by leaving her to sit in the parlor and be leered at by other patrons who jutted their chins at her and grinned and winked at each other while he took his pleasure with one of the girls upstairs. When he was done with his business he raised brows higher still by getting his hat and slipping out the side door and abandoning her. The girl cried less about it than one might have expected. She told Miss Lillian her name was Loretta May and that Benson had proved himself a son of a bitch in so many ways already that this further proof came as no surprise. But she said she’d rather starve out in the road than return to Atlanta and the only living kin she had, a sister she hated who’d grudgingly taken care of her for all seven years she’d been blind due to a swiftly degenerative disease of the retina. “Only reason I run off with the likes of Benson is I couldn’t stand another day more with Berniece,” she said. Miss Lillian felt sorry for her and offered to let her stay in a small room off the kitchen in exchange for whatever light housekeeping she might manage in her handicap. The girl said she never was much of one for housekeeping even when she could see what she was doing

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but she’d never been much of a shrinking violet either and one thing she knew she could do real well even blind was what she’d been doing with Benson in hotels every night since leaving Atlanta. She reasoned that from now on she might as well get paid for it and asked outright and with blushing cheeks if Miss Lillian was of a mind to hire her to work upstairs. Miss Lillian had already favorably appraised the girl’s pretty face and fine figure but she’d never worked with a blind girl before. She was sure some men wouldn’t care at all for a girl who couldn’t see what they were made of. Still, she liked this girl and was impressed with her grit, so she said, “Loretta May, honey, welcome to the house.” And although the madam been right that some of her patrons wouldn’t even consider humping the blind newcomer, others did it at least once just to see what it was like, and some of them liked it so much they wanted her every time thereafter. The girl more than earned her keep. Among those who favored her was John Ashley. He’d been patronizing Miss Lillian’s since turning sixteen some two yeas before and the madam was fond of him and thought him handsome with his mop of black hair and wide amused mouth, his quick lively eyes that seemed to miss nothing. His visits were irregular but whenever he presented himself early in the week when the house’s business was at its slowest, Miss Lillian would let him have the whole night with Loretta May for the bargain rate of five dollars. He liked that Loretta May’s skin smelled naturally of peaches and her short yellow hair was always freshly washed. She was the cleanest woman he’d ever put hand to, by far the best natured, the most ardent in the practice of her trade. He mentioned this last to her one time and she’d giggled and told him she was not so enthusiastic with others as with him. He thought she was lying but he could not deny the pleasure he took in the lie. Nor could he deny to himself how much he liked that she could not see him looking on her nakedness. He would often caress one part of her even as he secretly gawped upon another. Because she could not know where his gaze was set or see his face and whatever unguarded yearnings might show there, he felt possessed of a strange and keenly exciting power. But her defenselessness against his eyes also made him feel vaguely ashamed, and the way she sometimes smiled as he caressed her made him suspect she sensed his shame and that her knowledge of it gave her a kind of power too. His times with her were the best he’d had with a woman. One cool Monday evening he arrived at Miss Lillian’s in the company of his brother Bob, who never tired of chiding him for sporting

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with the same girl on every visit. “Might’s well get married, you gone do that,” Bob had said to him more than once. He himself insisted on a different whore every time and sometimes would enjoy two of them on a single visit, sometimes in the same bed, sometimes by turn, but in any case he kept strict account of his rotation among girls of the house. The only girl he did not include in the rotation was Loretta May, whom he’d tried once and then no more. “She’s a fine-lookin thing, but it aint no real fun in it if the woman cant see Captain Kidd standin tall,” he said, referring to his member by the name he’d given it when he was twelve years old. As John rapped on the door with the horseshoe knocker that hung there, Bob said it was feeling like a two-time night to him. They were admitted to the plush red-satined parlor by a husky and jovial moonfaced man named Easton whose duty it was to defend the house tranquillity against troublesome patrons. Miss Lillian greeted the brothers affectionately and they nodded hello to Sherman the Negro piano player and to a derbied man they knew who worked at the train depot. The only others in the parlor were a pair of strangers in suits and ties—one burly, one lean—who sat on a sofa with a couple of girls and looked with urban disdain at the brothers in their faded denim and worn brogans. In their eagerness to get upstairs the Ashleys paid them no heed. A minute later Bob was ensconced in a room with a greeneyed girl named Sheryl Ann and John Ashley was rapping lightly on Loretta May’s door and hearing her call, “Get on in here, you bad old gatorskinner, you.” As always she first bathed him in the large clawfoot tub Miss Lillian had placed in her room so that she would not have to use the common bath room the other girls shared—and so popular was she with the others that none but redhaired Quentin, who was quarrelsome by nature, had carped about her special privilege. After the bath she dried him and then dusted him with rose powder despite his usual happy protests. And then, because the moon was nearly full and its blue-silver blaze suffused the room, he extinguished the lantern and described to her the moonlight’s play in her bright hair and on her pale flesh stretched on the bed under the tall open window. She drew him to her and they entwined limbs and tongues and he entered her. They rocked together smoothly and when she emitted a small gasp deep in her throat that signaled her readiness he groaned in satisfaction and permitted himself to climax. He did not know if she truly came at such times or if she was simply putting on an act. He asked her one time, saying that he didn’t need any such pretense to enjoy himself,

16 / James Carlos Blake

and she’d smiled and said, “Well, if you dont know, I aint gonna tell you.” Then lay in the moonlight and smoked cigarettes and she put her fingers to his cheek and then his neck and said it felt like his cuts were almost completely healed. “Feels like there wont be hardly no scar at all,” she said. The first time he’d come to her she’d felt the freshly scabbed wounds he’d received in the fight with the Indian and when she asked where he got them he’d told her an alligator bit him. She laughed and said he was lying, that a gator bite would have done him a lot more damage, even she knew that. He said it was an old gator with only two teeth left in its head and thats why he only had the two scabs. She’d laughed even louder and kissed him hard on the mouth. He’d only just fallen asleep with his face in her hair when he was awakened by a heavy crash from downstairs followed by shouts and curses and in the tumult he heard his brother’s angry voice. He sat up and Loretta May grabbed his arm and said, “What?” He shook her off and scrambled from the bed and put on his pants and snatched up the pistol he’d sneaked in under his shirt. Miss Lillian expressly forbade guns in her house and he knew she would give him hell for it. He hurried shirtless and barefoot down the hallway and every head that appeared in other doorways as quickly withdrew at the sight of the pistol. Down in the parlor Bob—wearing but his trousers—was trading kicks with the leaner of the suited men even as he tried to shake off the burly suit who held him fast in a bear hug from behind so that his arms were pinned at his sides. The three of them reeled in an awkward cursing dance, banging into walls and furniture and upsetting chairs and tea tables and breaking various things of glass. Easton the bouncer lay on the floor as though listening for activity in the crawlspace below and Sherman stood bigeyed before his piano with his palms out as if he would deflect the fight from it. A trio of swearing girls in states of undress were delivering kicks of their own at the suited men and shrilling and jumping aside each time the fight lurched their way. The stairway behind John Ashley was bunched with clamoring spectating whores and from the foot of the stairway his cry of “Hey!” was lost in the uproar. All he could think to do was shoot. Without aiming he fired at the wall over the combatants’ heads and hit a framed photograph of former president Theodore Roosevelt whom Miss Lillian worshipped and the gunshot shook the air and rained shards of glass on them. The room fell silent but for the ragged gasping of the principals who were seized

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in a tableau of contention—clothes awry, hair amuss, faces florid and wild and turned toward John Ashley as he pointed the pistol from one to the other of the two suits and said, “Hands up both you boys.” As the suits put up their hands Bob Ashley drove a knee into the crotch of the burly one who’d held him and the girls cheered to see the man go bug-eyed and fall gagging to all fours. They cheered again when Bob struck the other suit a terrific roundhouse that spun the man threequarters around and dropped him to his knees with blood running through the fingers of the hand he clasped to his broken mouth. And then a handful of police came through the front door and the donnybrook was done. The sergeant in charge was named Abel Watkins and when he saw that the Ashleys were on the scene he wasn’t surprised. He’d known them for hellions since their boyhood. The brothers’ clothes were retrieved from upstairs and while they got dressed and some of the girls helped Easton up onto a sofa and tended to him, Bob Ashley gave Sergeant Watkins an account of events. After having his sport with Sheryl Ann, he had come downstairs to see what other girls might be available for his second go-round and found three of them sitting with the two men in suits. “You city boys sure take your time about pickin your pleasure,” Bob said, and beckoned Jenny the Horse to him. But the burly one of the suits caught Jenny by the wrist and said in a Yankee accent, “Hold on there, sugar. I haven’t decided who I want and it might be you.” Bob said that if the suit was going to pick Jenny, then pick her, and if not, he was taking her upstairs himself. The suit responded that he’d take all the damn time he wanted to make his choice and no white trash son of a bitch was going to tell him different. Bob’s response to that had been to kick the man in the face with the heel of his bare foot and send him over backward together with the sofa. Easton came on the run from the kitchen and grabbed Bob by the arm and Bob punched him backwards toward the other suit who bonked him on the crown with a half-full bottle and took him out of the fight. Then the first suit was up again and grabbed Bob tightly from behind and the other one commenced kicking him and hitting at him with the bottle. “Sonofabitches mighta put a hurt on me if Johnny didnt get their attention like he did,” Bob told Watkins. He was sporting a swollen purple eye and Sheryl Ann pressed a wet cloth to his scalp to stem the blood running from his hair. The city men looked even worse. The burly one had a broken

18 / James Carlos Blake

cheekbone and half of his face was grotesquely engorged. His gait was that of an old man, so bruised were his testicles. The lean one showed an upper lip like a large wedge of peeled plum and the fresh lack of a top front tooth. As Bob gave Sergeant Watkins his account of the fight, John Ashley heard the lean suit mutter to the other, “I told you we oughta come packing. But nooo, you said, whatta we need to pack for, you said. The fuck can happen in a damn cracker whorehouse, you said.” They told Sergeant Watkins they were from Chicago and en route to Miami for a fishing vacation. The burly one gave his name as Johnson, the lean one said he was Bode. They insisted that Bob had started the fight for no reason except jealousy over one of the girls who’d been keeping them company. But the three girls said that wasn’t so, that the Johnson one started it by calling Bob trash. “Christ,” the Bode one said. “thats no reason to kick a man in the face.” Sergeant Watkins glowered and said, “You sure’s hell from up north, aint you?” He charged the Chicagoans with felonious battery and disorderly conduct but was willing to close the case on payment from each of a twenty-five-dollar fine if they also paid Miss Lillian one hundred cash dollars apiece to cover the damages to her parlor. “Money wont patch up the insult to Teddy’s eye,” Miss Lillian said, looking at the skewed photograph dangling on the wall and at the bullet hole in Roosevelt’s spectacles. “But thats somebody else’s doing anyhow”—and here she gave John Ashley a tight-lipped look. The suits muttered about it but they paid up. Everyone gaped at the roll of bills the Johnson one produced from his coat to peel off the requisite 250 dollars. Watkins then ordered the two men escorted to the depot to await the Miami train. Sergeant Watkins concluded that Bob had acted in self-defense and so filed no charge against him. But he had to charge John Ashley. “It’s too many people heard that gunshot, Johnny,” he said. “The captain’s gonna hear about it in the mornin and ask me where’s the report. I dont charge you on it he’ll sure-God skin me good.” The captain was new to West Palm Beach, a hardliner from Jacksonville with a reputation for doing things by the book. John Ashley said he understood. He agreed to a charge of reckless discharge of a firearm in the city limit and gave Watkins a bond of $25 which, rather than go to court, he would be able to forfeit as a fine. Watkins gave him back his pistol and the matter was closed. At

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the front door the sergeant exchanged winks with Miss Lillian and she waggled her fingers after him and said “Come back soon, Abel—but not in that uniform, you hear?” Ten minutes later the Ashley brothers were having a drink and laughing along with a clutch of fawning girls who persisted in their excited babble about the fight when Miss Lillian’s Negro cook Jewel came into the parlor and quietly informed John Ashley that there was someone at the kitchen door who wanted to talk to him. He asked who but she couldn’t say—the man was holding back in the shadows like he didnt want to be recognized. John Ashley thanked her and stepped into the hallway to check the revolver and ensure it carried five ready cartridges, and then he went to the kitchen but saw no one at the door. He held the gun low against his leg and slipped out the screen door and stood fast in the shadow of the overhang and studied the moonlit sideyard. A voice in the dark said, “Over here, Johnny.” He made out the figure of a man standing in the moon-dappled shadows of an umbrella tree beside the pump shed and then saw that the man wore a uniform and then recognized Buford Moore, a Palm Beach County deputy sheriff whose family were longtime acquaintances with the Ashleys. John Ashley’s father had once carried Buford’s daddy on his back for more than five miles after coming on him in the Glades where he’d broken his knee on a limerock outcropping and had been struggling along on a makeshift crutch for almost a day. Buford Moore looked around nervously as John Ashley came up and said, “Hey, Buford, what you doin out here in the dark?” “Get out of the light, Johnny,” Buford whispered. “It won’t do to have nobody see us talkin.” John Ashley stepped into the shadow of the umbrella tree and slipped the pistol into the waistband at the small of his back. “Damn, bubba, what’s all the mystery about?” “Listen, Johnny,” said Buford Moore, “I got somethin to tell you.” He asked if he remembered the dead Indian that was dredged out of the Lauderdale canal about six weeks ago. “His face was pretty bad but his daddy knew him right off. He anyway had a panther head tattoo on his shoulder made it certain who he was. Name’s DeSoto Tiger. His daddy and uncle both some kind of high-muckety chiefs. Made a lot of noise about wantin justice for his nephew and yackety-yack-yack. Remember?” John Ashley said he had a vague recollection of all that. He took out his fixings and began to roll a cigarette.

20 / James Carlos Blake

Well, Moore told him, just last week a couple of sheriff’s deputies arrested an Indian breed trying to break into Willis’ Grocery over near Delray. It was about the fifth or sixth time they’d caught this son of a bitch thieving and this time Sheriff George meant to put him away for a good while. But the breed said he knew something the sheriff might like to know and he’d tell it to him if he let him go. The sheriff asked what and the breed said he knew who killed DeSoto Tiger. Sheriff George said who and the breed told him. The sheriff asked how did he know and the breed said because he saw him do it. Sheriff George said the breed’s say-so wasn’t hardly good enough and asked could he prove it and the breed says it shouldn’t be too hard since the fella stole about a thousand dollars’ worth of DeSoto Tiger’s otter furs and all the sheriff’s got to do is find out if this same fella’s sold about that much worth of otter furs to anybody lately. John Ashley ran his tongue along the edge of the paper and sealed the cigarette and asked Deputy Moore if he had a match. The deputy dug one out and struck it and held it cupped to him. John Ashley took a deep drag and said, “And so?” And so, deputy Moore said, Sheriff George had sent people out to check with all the fur buyers along the coast. They checked all the way down to Miami and bedamn if the Girtman Brothers hadn’t paid twelve hundred cash money for a load of otter skins brung to them by the very same fella the breed had told Sheriff George about. Sheriff George had got up a murder warrant last night and was sending it all over. “Well now, Buford,” John Ashley said, “let’s be real clear about this. Exactly who’s the warrant for?” “Well, John,” Buford Moore said, “exactly, the warrant’s for you.” John Ashley nodded and took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Yeah,” he said. “Figured it might be. Where’s that breed now? All safe and sound in a jail cell?” “Nuh-uh. Sheriff George did like he promised and let him go this afternoon. You know Sheriff George—trusts everybody to keep his word till they give him reason not to. But he made the breed promise to report to him once a week and told him if he broke his word he’d see to it he got sent to a turpentine camp for the rest of his days. That might could be enough reason to make the breed hold to his promise.” John Ashley spat. “Goddamn breed.” “I thought you oughta know,” Buford Moore said. “I been scoutin for you all day. I finally come here and seen the police wagon out front and I figured they’d maybe already got the word somehow, but

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when they come out you wasnt with them.” The deputy licked his lips. “Listen Johnny, I got to give the city cops this warrant”—he tapped a long folded paper in his shirt pocket. “Sheriff George’ll have my hide if they dont get it tonight. I been carrying it since this mornin. You understand, dont you?” John Ashley said he surely did and he thanked Buford Moore for the information. The deputy took a nervous look around and said, “Listen Johnny, the last time you and me saw each other was over a week ago, all right?” “Sure enough, Buford,” John Ashley said. The deputy smiled and shifted his weight awkwardly and said, “All right, well, you take care, hear?” He raised his hand in farewell and hastened away around the corner of the house. John Ashley went back into Miss Lillian’s parlor and took his brother aside and whispered to him what Buford Moore had said. He then went upstairs and told Loretta May something had come up and he had to go take care of it. He kissed her goodbye and said he’d see her soon. As he went out the door she stared after him with her sightless eyes. They bid Miss Lillian and the girls goodbye and exited by the back door and made away into the shadows of the pine forest. They jogged over a vague trail through the pineywoods, navigating the darkness with the sureness of bats. After a time they came out from the trees onto a grass prairie illuminated pale blue under a bone-pale gibbous moon and in another quarter mile came to the Loxahatchee Canal. From the thick palmettos along the bank they withdrew a canoe they’d hidden there and slipped it into the moon-silvered water and began paddling north at a strong steady pace. Before they’d gone half a mile the palmettos fell away and ghostly bluegreen vistas of moonlit sawgrass opened to all points of the compass. As they bent to their paddles Bob cursed once again Jimmy Gopher for a loose-lipped son of a bitch and swore he was going to track down that red nigger and put a slug in his brainpan. At his knees lay the .30 caliber Winchester carbine with which he intended to do it. John Ashley told him to do no such thing, that they had enough trouble as it was. “We’ll let Daddy say what to do.” “I already know what Daddy’s gonna say,” Bob said, “and so do you. He aint never been abidin of them who tells tales to police.” “Well, we’ll just let him say what to do,” John Ashley said. He

22 / James Carlos Blake

looked at his brother over his shoulder. “Dont be goin off half-cocked like you prone.” Bob Ashley snorted and spat in the passing water. A moment later his conversation turned to the fine time he’d had with Sheryl Ann and he told his brother of a new technique she’d taught him. “That gal’s always got some new trick to show,” he said. “Wonder where-all she gets them?” “Where you think?” John Ashley said and turned to his brother with a white grin. “It’s some men just natural-born good teachers.” Bob Ashley splashed him with his paddle and said, “You lying sack!” As they stroked their way upstream and Bob talked on about Sheryl Ann, John Ashley tried to anticipate what their father might say about all this, but his thoughts kept drifting to Loretta May, to images of being spooned against her fine ass with his face in her sweet-smelling hair. Bob at last fell silent and the only sounds were of their paddles cutting through the water and of animals rustling into the shorebrush at the canoe’s approach. At one point as they passed through the closing blackness of a hardwood overhand a huge bull gator let a resonant grunt so close to the boat that both brothers flinched and yanked their paddles from the water and then giggled at their start. “We ought take the hide,” Bob Ashley whispered, straining his eyes into the passing darkness to try to make out the gator. “I bet that grandaddy sumbuck goes sixteen feet if he goes a inch.” “Aint got the time and you know it,” John Ashley said, resuming his stroking. “From the sound of him we’re lucky he didnt want our hides, you ask me.” They chuckled softly as they emerged from the hollow and into the brightness of the moon and the clustered stars. They paddled in silence for a time and then Bob said softly: “Hey? You ever think about the future?” “What?” John Ashley said, stroking easily. “The future,” Bob said. “You ever think about what you want in the days to come.” John Ashley let off paddling and looked at him over his shoulder. “In the days to come?” He could not see Bob’s eyes under the shadow of his hat brim. Bob spat into the passing water. “Yeah,” he said. He looked about at the measureless compass of starry sky and the dark surrounding wilderness and said, “You know what I want?” He swept his arm before him and said, “This.” John Ashley looked around as though Bob might have indicated

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something he had not seen before. Then turned back to his brother and said, “This place? Hell boy, you got it.” Bob laughed softly. “I know. Jesus Johnny, look at it! Smell of it! Of all the damn places in the world we might of got born in, we’re some lucky sumbucks to get borned here.” John Ashley regarded the immense expanse of shadowed sawgrass and the near and distant hammocks silhouetted under the moon and he thought of the shallow bankless river that flowed through it all and was the lifeblood of his great wilderness. He breathed deeply of the night air pungent with the smells of ripe vegetations and raw earth and water richly seasoned with matter living and dead. We are, he thought. We are. Bob spread his arms as if he would embrace all the starry night and all the world both visible and enshadowed. “Just look at it, man! Aint it beautiful?” He laughed with a low vehemence, like one near to madness with a secret joy. And John Ashley laughed with him. Two hours later the trees drew in close on both banks of the canal. Against the moonbright sky they spotted the high black silhouette of a lightning-charred oak that served as their landmark. They put in against the bank and pulled the canoe out of the water and Bob Ashley removed the carbine and they hid the boat in the brush. They pressed ahead on foot and followed narrow winding trails through hardwood forest and underbrush. As they went they listened intently for anything that sounded out of place but heard only the calls of owls and nighthawks, the scuttling of creatures in the brush, the rantings of frogs, the keening mosquitoes at their ears. Their plan was to gather the gator hides they’d left to dry at their waycamp by the north bend of the Loxahatchee River and then make for home and tell their father the news about the Indian. The eastern sky was showing a pale band of pink light as they drew close to their camp. When they werent slogging through mud they had to step carefully over vinecovered ground. Up ahead the trees abruptly fell away. They paused at the edge of the woods to listen hard and survey the open ground to the east where it came up against a dense palmetto thicket and the pinewoods beyond. Their waycamp lay in a natural clearing a hundred yards into those pines. In addition to the gator hides, they had a wagon in there and a tethered mule. On the far side of the camp was a corduroy track of pine timbers they’d laid over the mucky ground for a distance of a quarter-mile to where the ground was higher and the track became a solid limestone trail.

24 / James Carlos Blake

From there the going in the wagon was easier the rest of the way to their father’s whiskey camp at the edge of the deeper swamp and but a few miles from Twin Oaks. But now they heard the chugging of a motorcar and made out dim headlamps coming along the open ground. The lights progressed on a narrow raised-rock road a timber company had once used to take out pine logs. After clearing the trees for twenty yards on both sides of the road the company went broke and abandoned the site and the Ashleys had since used the road for their own purposes. It originated at the Dixie Highway about a mile to the east and terminated at the palmetto thicket. “Who you reckon?” Bob asked, looking off at the coming lights. “Nobody we call friend, I’ll wager,” John Ashley said. They made for a better vantage point closer to the road as the motorcar came on. They were hiding in the high shrubs near the end of the road when a Model T sedan came clattering into view in the dawn gloam and halted. The motor shut off and the headlamps extinguished and two uniformed county deputies got out of the car and stood staring at the seemingly impenetrable palmetto thicket before them. One of the men said something the brothers couldn’t hear clearly and the other said, “Maybe so but Daddy said check it and thats what we going to do.” “Bobby Baker,” Bob whispered. “And Sammy Barfield with him. How you reckon they know about this camp?” “No tellin who’s seen us comin and goin on that road,” John Ashley said. “It’s too open. I told Daddy we ought of quit this camp.” The deputies now found the narrow path the Ashleys had cut through the palmettos and they trudged into the thicket in the direction of the camp. The Ashleys set out after them, following at a short distance and moving easily as shadows. Halfway to the camp the path abruptly opened into a small clearing where the Ashleys had felled most of the pines they’d used to make the corduroy track—and now John Ashley raised his fist in signal to Bob and they quickly closed in on the lawmen. The deputies heard them too late. They turned and saw the brothers emerging from the brush not fifteen feet behind them, saw Bob Ashley holding the carbine at his hip like a long-barreled pistol and John Ashley pointing the .44 Colt as he came. “Oh shit,” the one called Sammy Barfield said, and he quick put up his hands. The other kept his hands at his sides as Bob Ashley hastened to

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Sammy and snatched his service revolver from its holster and lowered the carbine and pointed the pistol squarely at Sammy’s chest. Sammy’s arms were up as high as they could go and he said, “Oh shit, Bob, dont shoot me.” “You’re under arrest, Johnny,” the other deputy said. John Ashley was smiling widely as he came up to this deputy and said “Hello to you too, Bobby. How’s daddy’s little deputy?” Bob Baker’s father George was the high sheriff of Palm Beach County and had been since the county’s inception three years earlier. John Ashley relieved him of his revolver and gave the piece cursory examination and stuck it in his waistband. Then said: “Under arrest, you say?” He laughed. “Hell, Bobby, do I look under arrest?” “For murder, John.” “That right? Who’m I sposed to killed?” “DeSoto Tiger.” “Who?” “Quit the bullshit. We know you shot that Indian. We got a witness.’ John Ashley grinned hugely. “Well if I did, I guess it wouldn’t mean nothin to shoot the both you too. I mean, they can only hang me once, aint that right?” “Even you aint that damn dumb,” Bobby Baker said. John Ashley laughed. He spun the .44 on his finger like a storybook cowboy and then affected to aim very carefully between the deputy’s eyes from a distance of four feet. “You dont scare me a goddamn bit and you never have. You shoot me, every police officer for three counties around will come huntin you.” John Ashley moved the gunsights down to Bobby Baker’s heart and stroked his chin in affected contemplation for a moment, then shook his head and raised the sights to Bobby’s forehead once again. “Bang!” he said and lowered the pistol and grinned. “You that important now, hey Bobby? All them police would be lookin to even the score for you?” “I aint no Indian, Johnny?” Bob Ashley said “You sure aint, bubba. You got to be near deaf not to heard us comin up behind you.” “You’re under arrest too,” Bobby Baker said to him. “As an accomplice.” Bob Ashley hooted and shook his head. “I guess we best shoot

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these boys, Johnny, before this hardcase decides to tote the whole damn family off to jail.” “Oh lord, boys,” the deputy called Sammy said, “dont shoot us, boys.” “Shut up, Sammy,” Bobby Baker said. “They aint about to shoot anybody.” “Maybe yes and maybe no,” John Ashley said. He gestured at Bob Baker’s leg and said, “Take that thing off and hand it here.” Two years earlier Bob Baker had tracked down a Negro fugitive wanted for the murder of his wife and brother and in the ensuing confrontation he had shot the Negro dead at the same moment that the man blew off most of his lower leg with a twelve-gauge buckshot load. The doctors amputated just below the knee and he had since worn a wooden prosthetic. He had become so proficient with it that his walk showed only a hint of awkwardness. None who knew him considered him handicapped. It was a point of pride with him never to mention the leg and his friends knew better than to refer to it in his presence. “Well dont just stand there gawkin,” John Ashley said. “Take it off and hand it over.” Bob Ashley guffawed. Bob Baker stood fast and glared at him. John Ashley cocked the .44 and aimed it at Bob Baker’s good foot. “You tirin my patience, peckerwood,” he said. “You dont take that thing off right now, I’m gonna shoot you in the other foot is what I’m gonna do.” The early dawnlight had not yet dispersed the ground darkness and everyone’s feet were but vague entities. “You aint gonna shoot any part of me, John, and you damn well know it.” John Ashley fired. The round tore a chunk off the heel of Bob Baker’s boot and the deputy yipped and flinched sidewise and the loud crack of the gunshot was swallowed almost instantly by the breadth of the surrounding country. “Goddamn me if I aint a piss-poor shot,” John Ashley said. Bob Ashley laughed so hard he had a coughing fit. John Ashley cocked the piece and this time held it with both hands and aimed at Bob Baker’s foot again and the deputy said, “Hold it! Hold it, you crazy son of a bitch!” He sat on the ground and tugged up his pants leg and unbuckled the straps holding the prosthetic in place. He handed it up to John Ashley. “You aint right in the head, you know that? You never been.” John Ashley was enjoying himself immensely. He hefted the pros-

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thetic leg with its boot still attached and said, “Do much dancin with this thing, Bobby? I guess you lost your taste for dancin since before you got crippled, huh? You know, I dont recall seein you at one single dance after that one you took what’s-her-name to. Judy? Junie? Julie—thats it. Say, whatever become of her, anyhow?” Bob Ashley whooped and had another spasm of coughing laughter. Bob Baker sat in place and said nothing but glared at John Ashley who could almost smell the anger rising off him like a malefic vapor. He smiled at how easy it was to rile him with just mention of a girl from their past. “Ah well, enough of relivin the good old days, eh Bobby? You, Sammy, help this poor crippled man to his feet—his foot, I mean.” Deputy Barfield pulled Bob Baker up onto his good leg and Bobby braced himself on Sammy’s shoulder. Still chuckling, Bob Ashley went to the deputies’ car and punctured all four tires with his buck knife, then opened one of the hood panels and reached in and yanked several wires off the engine and flung them far into the brush. “Now you boys get goin,” John Ashley ordered. “And tell your daddy, Bobby, the next time he sends someone after me he best send a whole man.” The two lawmen started off for the highway with their arms around each other’s shoulders, their three-legged gait awkward and shambling and the Ashley brothers’ laughter in their ears. The brothers watched them at their slow progress until they were distant figures nearly a halfmile away against the redly rising sun. Then John Ashley went to the disabled Model T and tossed the wooden leg onto the backseat and he and Bob went on to their camp. An hour later the brothers had the hides on the wagon and had retrieved and hitched the mule and were on the corduroy track for home.

THREE March 1912

FOLLOWING HIS RELEASE FROM THE PALM BEACH COUNTY JAIL he’d made directly for the deeper reaches of the Everglades, avoiding all the various waycamps he and DeSoto Tiger had ever used, bypassing widely all Indian villages and the possibility of informers who would point out his direction to some who might come inquiring. For five days he poled his dugout through the maze of waterways winding through sawgrass and around hardwood hammocks and palm islands and pine stands and along sloughs wide and narrow until he arrived in a region unfamiliar even to him, who had lived in the Everglades all his life and hunted and trapped and ranged over a considerable portion of it. For five nights he slept in the dugout or on the raised ground of hammocks, face and hands coated heavy with muck against the mosquitoes. Quick rain showers came and went, drumming on the hard crown of his bowler. And when he was at last so deep in the wilderness he could not except in the vaguest sense have said where he was, he beached the dugout in the high dark shade of a cypress-and-palm hammock and there made a camp of sorts and settled in to let time pass and to ponder the possibilities of his future. He’d heard that John Ashley had been warned about the murder warrant and had left the state to avoid prosecution, but the put little stock in the rumor. No telling where the man might be. He could be hid out somewhere in the Glades just as he himself was and who’d know it but them who’d never tell. Besides, there were other Ashleys

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who might come looking for him and any of them capable of settling accounts for brother John. Lay low was the thing to do. Way out here where none but the wildest ever ventured. He subsisted on fish and turtles, on eggs pilfered from bird nests. He built small cookfires of lighterwood only in the brightest hours of the day the better to hide against the sunlight and clouds whatever smoke might ascend through the thick cover of the cypress branches. He napped often but never deeply and always with an ear cocked for anomalous sound. At various times every day he climbed high in a tree and scanned the horizon for signs of encroaching others but saw none. A week went by and then another and with the passing of each day he grew more confident that his hideout was a good one. He constructed a solid lean-to of saplings and palm fans against the occasional rain shower and the nightly dew. He built a bed of palm fronds. On the far side of the hammock he discovered a wide shallow creek just beyond the reach of the tree overhang, its current clear and smooth and thronged with turtles and bream and bass as long as his forearm. His immediate thought was of a trotline, a line with baited hooks affixed to it at intervals and let to hang into the water from one bank to the other overnight and retrieved the next day with its catches. In the dugout he had a sufficient length of line and plenty of hooks, and about ten yards onto the grassy bank on the other side of the creek stood a small cypress to which he could attach the other end of the line. But the range from the edge of the hammock and across the creek to the dwarf cypress was perhaps forty feet and all of it out in the open and his wariness would not easily abate. He was loathe to expose himself for even so short a distance and for as brief a time as it would take to tie the line. Another week passed and each day found him squatting in the shadows of the hammock bank and considering the creek. The trotline he’d fashioned days before and then lain aside was unnecessary to feed himself—he every day on his handline caught more fish than he could eat. But he was angry at himself for being too fearful to string the trotline. He had been fearful his entire life and knew it. And knew too that others knew it. Neither white man nor Indian had ever shown him a measure of respect and he could not fault them for that. Why should anyone respect him, who could not respect himself for his cowardice? He determined to do it. He would wait for dark and then cross the creek and attach the line. The resolution was heady. Yes, he would do it and be done with being afraid. And now asked himself why he

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should wait until dark. Who but he and the beasts inhabited this portion of wildland for miles around? Now—now in the clarity of full daylight—was the time to prove to himself he could do it. He retrieved the ready trotline and baited the hooks with chunks off the several largemouth he’d caught earlier that morning and he fastened one end of the line to a ground root and fed out the line behind him as he walked backward out of the cover of the trees. He eased into the creekwater and it rose to his chest as he sidestepped his way across, playing out the trotline as he went. As he clambered up the other bank he almost laughed out loud in his exultation at being unafraid. And now he reached the little cypress and checked the lay of the line behind him and then tied this end to the cypress and the job was complete. He went to the creek bank and admired the hang of the line in the water and already a fat turtle took the bait on one of the hooks and was caught. He looked all around and smiled at the infinite depth of dizzying blue sky carrying a few thin clouds above a scattering of hammocks in a vista of sawgrass to the horizons. And never heard the carbine crack from the cluster of cabbage palms some one hundred and fifty yards distant that sent up a fluttering flock of roseate spoonbills from its feed in the grass shallows and sped before it a .30 caliber bullet to enter his skull in front of his right ear and spin him about completely before he pitched into the creek with a huge splash. He bobbed to the surface facedown and floated there as the water again stilled and the blood issuing from his head drifted away on the slow current in wispy red rivulets as vague and elusive as dreams of courage.

FOUR The Liars Club

OLD JOE ASHLEY’S DADDY COME TO FLORIDA AS A YOUNG MAN after the War Between the States. Him and his wife. They come from Tennessee by way of more than a dozen years in Georgia and then settled in Lee County, on the Gulf side nearabouts Fort Myers. The story has it he was killed in a timber camp one winter by a rattlesnake bit him in the chin when he woke up from a dinnertime nap under a tree. They say he died with his face all swole up just ugly as sin. Old Joe used to tell folk the only three things his daddy left to him was a scarred-up fiddle, the know-how for making good moonshine, and a damn good reason never to sleep on the ground unless he absolutely had to. Old Joe moved his family to this side of the state in ought-four, some seven years before John killed that Indian and all his bad troubles began. Besides Joe and Ma Ashley, there were five boys and two girls—and two more daughters would be born some years later. It was no more than a fair-sized family, as cracker families go. They come across in a pair of wagons pulled by mules wearing muck shoes, come all the way through what was still awful wild country along the Caloosahatchee River and over to Lake Okeechobee and on down through the sawgrass glades to Pompano on the coast. In them days only a Indian or a hardshell cracker could make a trip like that across the Devil’s Garden. Those who first saw them come out on this side of the glades with

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Old Joe driving the mules along with his whip popping like gunshots said both the family’s wagons was near covered with the hides of all the diamondbacks they’d killed along the way and not a hide under six feet. Old Joe always wore a rattlesnake hatband and a rattlesnake belt. Carried a rattle in his pocket about the size of a kazoo and liked to come up quiet behind an ole boy and shake it hard and laugh like hell to see the fella jump five feet in the air and whirl around all bigeyed. Some called him Rattler Joe and said he never did seem to mind the name a bit. He told folks he’d made the move because he was tired of trading in hides and furs for a living and wanted some of the steady wages Henry Flagler was paying his railroad workers. Maybe so. But there was a bunch of stories that followed right behind him when he come over from the west side and one of them was that he’d started cutting in on the wrong people’s whiskey business in Lee County. When he didnt take their warnings to quit they busted up his operation and whipped his nigger helper near to death and threatened to burn down his house with everybody in it if he didnt clear out. According to this story Joe and the family was in the wagons and on their way east by the next sunup. That story’d been whispered around for a couple of years when some fella named Witliff in Pompano made the mistake of telling it out loud to a bunch of old boys that included a friend of Joe’s who took it back to him. Joe went to Witliff’s house and called him out and beat him senseless right there in his yard and in front of his family. Told him if he ever told tales about him again he’d cut out his tongue. Another story said he’d left Lee County after clubbing a young fella near to death with a grub hoe handle for getting improper with one of his daughters. They say he gave that boy a stutter and a useless left arm and a droop-eye the rest of his life. Trouble was, one of the boy’s best uncles was a rich Fort Myers cattleman who was related by marriage to the high sheriff and was friends with all the local judges. Joe didnt much care for the odds, so he packed up the family and headed out on the Caloosahatchee trace. Story has it that the cattleman sent a couple of roughs after him but they never come back. Could be they simply made off with the money they was paid to deal with Joe. Or could be they had the bad luck to catch up to him. Joe Ashley paid bottom dollar for an abandoned half-burned-down house in the deep pineywoods just west of Pompano and pretty soon him and his boys fixed it up good. They were a tight family that mostly kept to itself but they were friendly enough whenever they came into

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town or met with a neighbor out on the Old Dixie Highway, which at that time wasnt much more than a bunch of ruts packed with rock in some stretches and with shell in others and hardly wide enough for a pair of wagons to pass each other by. Most who got to know the Ashleys liked them fairly well. But there were some who were quick to believe every mean story ever told about them and thought the whole family was a bunch of naturalborn outlaws. Such folk were just too flat afraid of them not to hate them. The Ashleys always would have admirers, bunches of them, but they’d always have bad enemies too. Everybody who knew them was pretty much one or the other. For a time after they first got to Pompano, Joe and two of his boys—Frank and Ed—worked as woodchoppers for Flager’s railroad. The eldest boy Bill worked as a chopper a few months too but pretty soon gave up axing to go work in a general store. Not long after the Ashleys moved to Pompano he took Bertha Rodgers to wife. He was the brainy one, Bill, the most serious, though they say he could play the banjo like he’d been born to it and he’d sometimes take a turn with a string band at a local dance. You’d see him around town more often than his brothers, reading magazines or the newspaper in the cafes, coming and going from banks and lawyer offices, taking care of Old Joe’s business matters. He never did get in such bad trouble as his daddy and his little brothers did, but some say it’s only because he did all his crimes with a pen instead of a gun. All five of the Ashley brothers were close, but Frank and Ed were said to be fraternal twins and so naturally they was extra tight. And John and Bob were special-close because they were the youngest and grew up together hunting and trapping in the Everglades from the time they were big enough to shoot a rifle. John wasnt but eleven at the time the family moved to Pompano and Bob about a year older, and while Frank and Ed were cutting railroad ties with their daddy the two pups were bringing home meat for the table and gator and rattler hides to sell at the trading posts. Trapping and hunting was what they liked best but they could do lots of other things real well. Old Joe always could do damn near anything with his hands and he taught his boys the same. John was fourteen when a doctor down in Miami hired him and Bob to roof his house and over the next thirty years that roof never lost a shingle, not even in a hurricane. They worked in a Pompano packinghouse for a time and were said to handle a butchering knife as good as anybody in the place. But they didnt much like working for wages and went back to trapping for their daily bread. They got to know their way all over the Glades even better than their

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daddy—and Old Joe was as much at home in the Devil’s Garden as a cottonmouth. John and Bob were the wildest of the Ashleys, everbody pretty much agreed on that, though John wasnt nearly the hot-head Bob was. They say John was generally one to think a thing through before acting on it, leastways if he had the chance. Bob, he was always quick as a struck match to flare and burn. Which is exactly why he died the way he did. They were the best shooters in the family too, John and Bob—not counting their daddy. They said Bob could shoot the whiskers off a rabbit at over a hundred yards with his old lever-action Winchester, but John was even more of a deadeye. At a traveling show in West Palm one time there was a .22 rifle shooting gallery with a line of little tin ducks steady moving across the far end of the tent on a conveyor belt in front of a backboard. The five brothers had a contest and by the time John and Bob were the last two left they were shooting at the ducks from forty feet outside the tent. They’d drawn a crowd by then and Old Joe was looking on too. When John finally won from some fifty feet out, the onlookers gave him a big hand and he bowed like an actor on a stage. He wasnt but fifteen at the time and loved to show off. Then Old Joe took the little .22 from him and backed up another ten feet and bangbang-bang he knocked down a line of twelve ducks without a miss. Then he gives the rifle back to John and the boy didnt hit but nine of his twelve. The crowd gave Joe a bigger hand than they had John. When it came to showing off, Old Joe never was one to be outdone by his boys. They’d been in Pompano about six years when word got around that Joe had set up a still somewhere in the pines and gone in the whiskey business. Gone back in the whiskey business is what most said. And because Bill had such a good head for account books and such, Ole Joe made him his business manager. The Ashleys didnt have any local rivals in the trade except for a couple of swamp-rat shiners named Runyon and Aho who’d been around for years and years although hardly anybody ever saw them because they never come into town but once in a blue moon. They had a cabin somewhere in the Devil’s Garden and shared an Indian woman who lived with them. She never come to town. After Joe started making and selling whiskey on this side of the state neither Runyon nor Aho ever come to town again and nobody ever saw them anywhere else either. And somewhere along the way Joe took over their stills as abandoned property. There were some mean stories told about what might of happened to the swamp rats, but the plain and simple of it was that nobody knew if

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the Ashleys had anything to do with their disappearances and nobody cared a thinker’s damn anyhow. The only thing for sure was that Old Joe’s product was way better than what the swamp rats had been peddling. Everybody who ever tasted the stuff will tell you that Joe Ashley’s shine was the finest ever made in the south of Florida. He soon had a steady line of customers from Stuart to Lauderdale and was using his boys to deliver the loads. And it wasnt much of a secret that he was selling to the Indians. There’s something more to tell about Runyon and Aho. It was a common story that one or the other of them sired a child by the Indian woman who lived with them, a boy they named Hector. When the kid grew up he used the name Runyon but that dont mean Runyon was his daddy. Some say he just ruther have that name than Aho, and who could blame him. You’d see him roundabout the Indian River towns a lot more than either of the two men because he was the one they sent in to get whatever supplies they needed. Like most breeds he looked more Indian than white. He was brownskinned and his hair was as black as ink and he wore it long from the time he was a child. But he had blue eyes and the inside of his forearms was pale as any white man’s. He was bad-dog mean, that boy, everybody said so. Sometimes he’d come into a town for no reason but to pick a fight with another boy and then just tear him up. He’d as soon gouge out your eye in a fight as not, as soon bite off your ear, your damn nose. The only boy who wasnt afraid of him was Bobby Baker, who was a few years older and some bigger, and for some reason they got along. Far as anybody knows, Bobby was the closest thing to a friend Heck Runyon ever had. When he was about fourteen he was accused of stealing a farmer’s horse off a farm and the man wanted him throwed in jail. Sheriff George went out in the Glades to look for him and came back saying he couldnt find hide nor hair of him anywhere. But there was some who said he’d found him all right—and then helped him to get away to DeSoto County where he got work as a cowhunter, which is what they called a cowboy in Florida in them days. That all happened around ought-eight, a couple of years before Joe Ashley started up his whiskey business and Runyon and Aho vanished. It wasnt till seven years later that Heck Runyon showed up again on this side of the state. At the time he come back he was still wanted for stealing the horse but the farmer dropped the charge a few days after Heck went to live in a hut out behind the Baker place. Some said

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Sheriff George made a deal with the farmer. A story went around that Heck had been working the last couple of years as a regulator for a rich DeSoto County rancher. A regulator was somebody paid to stop rustlers, and they say Heck Runyon stopped a bunch of them as stopped as they could get by shooting them graveyard dead. Then he got in a saloon fight with a cowhunter and cut the fella up pretty bad. Ruther than stick around and see what the law might say about it, he’d come back to his old stomping grounds. He’d been back about six months when Sheriff George made him a Palm Beach County deputy. Not too long later he killed a prisoner. He was bringing the man back to the county jail in West Palm Beach after the fella was convicted in a trial in Stuart and they were sitting in the coach while the train made a whistle stop in Jupiter. Witnesses said the prisoner called him a mongrel dog and spit in his face and Heck Runyon clubbed him to death with his revolver right then and there. Women and children saw it and was screaming and running off the train. They say it was a bloody mess. There was talk that Heck Runyon ought be charged with murder since the prisoner had his hands cuffed at the time. The newspaper said he ought for sure at least be fired, that the county didnt need any deputies who thought they were judge, jury and executioner. Sheriff George argued that Deputy Runyon had been strongly provoked and had just cause, but he was enough of a politician to know when to give in to popular opinion and so he fired him. Heck Runyon hardly ever showed himself in town after that but it was said he was still living out on the Baker property and that Sheriff George was still using him to track down fugitives who made off into the Devil’s Garden. The bad blood between John Ashley and Bobby Baker started over a girl, which aint such an uncommon story. Leastways thats how most tell it. John Ashley was fifteen at the time and Bobby about nineteen. They’d knowed each other since the Ashleys moved to Pompano. They werent never exactly friends, but during those first few years they’d been friendly enough. They say Bobby Baker was the one showed John Ashley all the best fishing spots in the Indian River and John taught Bobby plenty about tracking game in the Glades. Their daddies got along all right too—at least in the years before John’s trouble over the Indian. Old Joe and Sheriff George would take a cup of coffee together in Lucy’s Cafe in West Palm sometimes or buy each other a drink at Blue’s store at Lake Towhee and talk about mules and dogs and fishing. Like with their boys, nobody’d go so far as to say they were

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friends, but Old Joe made it plain he appreciated that the high sheriff was one to live and let live when it came to whiskeymaking. The way. Sheriff George saw it, if the federal government wanted to tax the whiskey a man made, it could damn well send its own men to collect it. Sheriff George was anyway known to take a drink ever now and then and was said to be pretty fond of Joe Ashley’s product his ownself. Anyhow, there used to be a dance every Saturday night in a big auction barn a few miles south of West Palm and the Ashley boys would usually come up from Pompano to dance and meet girls. Even Bill Ashley would come up sometimes just to play his banjo with the band and have a dance or two with his wife Bertha, who everybody liked. They were lively affairs with good string bands and plenty of food and punch and of course every man brought his own jug. One Saturday evening Bobby Baker showed up with a girl named Julie Morrell, a pretty sixteen-year-old who had long honey-colored hair and freckles and a smile to melt a grown man’s heart. Bobby was crazy in love with her and didnt make any secret of it. He’d met her just a few weeks earlier and was telling people he was by God going to marry her one day or know the reason why. The Ashleys were there that night as usual and the brothers took turns dancing with every girl in the place. Frank and Ed and Bob cut in on Bobby one after another but he didnt seem to mind all that much. He was proud of his pretty sweetheart and they say he liked being envied by the other fellas. Then John Ashley cut in on him, and while Julie was spinning around in John Ashley’s arms Bob Ashley sidled up to Bobby and started up a conversation and the next time Bobby looked out to the dance floor neither Julie Morrell nor John Ashley was anywhere in sight. Everybody knows John Ashley always did have a way with the ladies—with proper ones as well as them not so proper. Just exactly how much of a way he had with Julie Morrell in the darkness of the pines beyond the barn that evening is something nobody but him and her would ever know for certain. But it aint hard to imagine what Bobby Baker thought when he saw they were gone from the barn. He went running out to look for her and the Ashley boys followed him outside and watched him run around yelling Julie’s name to make himself heard over the music from the barn. When they started laughing at him, Bobby went at Bob Ashley with both fists swinging. Maybe he picked out Bob because he was the one who’d distracted him long enough for John to make off with Julie, or maybe just because Bob was the Ashley standing closest to him at the moment. He was older

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and bigger than Bob, but Bob had a reputation as a vicious scrapper who even a lot of the older fellas were afraid of. They punched and kicked and bit and scratched and gouged and pulled each other’s hair and rolled around on the ground all locked up like a couple of pit dogs. A small bunch of spectators gathered round to root for one or the other but most people at the dance never even knew the fight took place. It was fairly even going for about five minutes and then Bobby got astraddle of Bob Ashley and got both hands on his throat and try as he might Bob Ashley couldnt buck him off. When it was pretty clear that Bobby was going to kill him if somebody didnt stop him, Frank and Ed finally stepped in and pulled them apart. They say Bob Ashley was black in the face by then and likely wouldnt of lasted another halfminute. They said his eyes were bloodshot for a week after. They said both them boys looked like they’d been hit by a train. A deputy sheriff showed up about then and Frank and Ed were explaining things to him when here comes John Ashley and Julie Morrell out of the pines. Julie was blushing and her hair was all messy and with leaves in it and she never said a word nor looked anybody in the eye but just went right on by them all and into the barn. They say John Ashley was grinning like a keyboard and said, “What’s goin on, boys?” Bobby Baker was so beat up and wore out he couldnt hardly stand by himself but he tried to go at John anyway and had to be held back by the deputy. They say if looks could kill, Bobby Baker would’ve put John Ashley in his grave right then and there. The way the story goes, when Julie Morrell’s daddy who was a grocer heard what happened he wanted to charge John Ashley with rape, only Julie insisted to him it had been no such a thing and swore she’d never lie to the contrary in court. They say he whipped her bare ass bloody with a razor strap. Supposedly he made threats against John Ashley and against Bobby Baker too because he was the one he’d entrusted with his daughter’s safekeeping that night—but it’s probly not true. Like most folk he was too afraid of the Ashley and the Bakers both to of said anything so reckless. Nobody was surprised when he finally never did anything except pack up his family and move away. Some said they went to the panhandle, some said out to Arkansas where he had kin. Nobody knew for sure. A few years later during the war, one of the boys come home on leave from and army aviation school in Alabama and swore up and down he’d had the pleasure of sweet Julie Morrell in a Birmingham whorehouse. Whether it was true or not, it’s what most people come to believe became of her. As for the Ashleys and Bakers, well, Old Joe and Sheriff George

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were seen having a drink together in a Pompano saloon not a week after the fight and joking about how a pretty girl could sure make the bucks lock horns. And about a month later a dozen witnesses saw John Ashley meet up with Bobby Baker on the New River trading docks. John poled up in a skiff and was pulling a second one loaded with plumes. Bobby was there helping his cousin Freddie to patch the bottom of his fishing boat and was still carrying scars from the fight with Bob Ashley. They say John Ashley greeted him as friendly as you please although nobody made to shake hands. John had a round of beers brought out to the dock from the trading store and told about his plume hunt in the rookeries southwest of Okeechobee. He told Bobby they ought to go fishing together in the Indian River again sometime like they used to. If anybody had Julie Morrell on his mind nobody said so. Neither Bobby nor Freddie hardly said a word the whole time. Then John Ashley said so long and got in his skiff and poled away. They say the Baker boys watched him go and then poured out the bottles of beer they neither one had taken the first sip of. Far as anybody knows, Bobby Baker and John Ashley never did go fishing together again. In nineteen and eleven the Ashleys made theirselfs a new homestead in the piney swamps a few miles southwest of Gomez. Old Joe bought sixty acres set about midway between Peck’s Lake and the south fork of the St. Lucie River. Not a neighbor for miles around. About threequarters of the place was nothing but pine swamp, but there was a wide high clearing in the middle of the property and him and his boys built a good-sized house on it. It was a dogtrot—had a breezeway between the two halfs of the house—with a full wide porch both front and back and a steep-pitched roof and a chimney at either one of the gable sides. Had a big kitchen out back. They built the thing of Dade County pine and shingled it with cypress to let the heat out through the roof. That Dade pine’s about the best lumber in the world but it’s mostly all been cleared away and you cant hardly find a stick of it anymore. It’s so fulla resin you can work it real easy while it’s green but once it ages and that resin dries up you cant drive a nail in it with a sledgehammer. Termite’ll bust its teeth on it is how hard it gets. The bad news is, a house made of Dade pine ever catches fire it’ll burn down quick as a kitchen match on account of all that resin. They call it lighterwood out in the Devil’s Garden because it’s so easy to start a campfire with it. The house was shaded by a big live oak to either side and had a

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clear view for forty yards in all directions right up to the edge of the pine swamps all around. The two shade trees were pretty near the same size and the reason Old Joe named the place Twin Oaks. There was dozens of creeks and waterways all around the property connecting it east and west to ever part of that region between Lake Okeechobee and the Indian River lagoon and south to the sawgrass country. But there was only one road into the property—a narrow roundabout trail they’d cut through all that swampy pineland between the house and the Dixie Highway. It was awful rough going for a motor vehicle, but that was the idea, to make it damn hard for anybody to drive up to their place, especially at night. That trail was hardly wide enough for a wagon except at a couple of points where they’d broadened it enough so a car could make a turnaround—just in case it ever had to. Joe pretty soon had him a whiskey camp about three miles southwest of the Twin Oaks house—out at the Crossbone Creek at the edge of the Devil’s Garden. Even after he built his other camps this one was said to be his favorite. It was the biggest and about the best hid. His next one was set a few miles farther south in the Hungryland Slough. By then he was making deliveries as far north as Fort Pierce and as far south as Miami and his business was better than ever. Then that Indian turned up dead in that Lauderdale canal and Palm Beach County Sheriff George Baker charged John Ashley with murder. A lot of people couldnt understand why all the to-do about a damn dead Indian. But Sheriff George said he had to do something about it because there was a witness who’d seen John Ashley do the deed and there was other evidence besides. The “evidence,” as he called it, was a bunch of otter furs John Ashley’d sold down in Miami. That struck lots of people as pretty damn slim evidence because one bunch of otter furs looks just like every other bunch and how was anybody gonna tell em apart? As for the witness, he was a low breed named Jimmy Gopher and such a naturalborn liar that if he told you water ran downhill you’d have you doubts. He was lying if he said hello. He’d vanished into the Everglades just as soon as he was set loose from jail and didnt nobody ever see him again. There was talk Bob Ashley hunted him down deep in the Devil’s Garden and killed him so he couldnt never testify against John Ashley but there never was any proof of it. It might of been just talk from those who hated the Ashleys and would tell any sort of lie to try to put them in a worse light with the law. We no sooner heard about the warrant for John Ashley than we heard Bobby Baker and Sammy Barfield had caught up to him and

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his brother Bob in one of their waycamps—but the Ashleys had somehow got the drop on them and took away their pistols and disabled their car and made them to walk home. A Palm Beach deputy found them sitting by the side of the Dixie Highway the next morning. What made it even more embarrassing for Bobby was he’d lost his artificial leg. He said he somehow got it caught in a hole in the limerock trail they’d been walking on and it was stuck so fast he didnt have no choice but to unstrap it and leave it there. Sammy Barfield didnt have much to add to the story except to say it was just the way Bobby told it. Poor Sammy looked pretty shook up for a time afterwards. He always was strung too tight for police work and he got out of it before much longer. When Sheriff George sent some men out into that piney swamp to fix the car and bring it back they found Bobby’s leg in it. All anybody could figure was that somebody had come along and found it and knew damn well who it belonged to, especially with the county police car just down the trail. Whoever it was had got it unstuck and throwed it in there. Nobody roundabouts saw hide nor hair of John Ashley for the next two years. Some said he’d gone to Alabama, some said out to Oregon. Others said he hid out someplace in Texas where he had kin who ran a hotel. Wherever it was he went, two years later he came back. Just walked into Sheriff George’s office one day in the company of his daddy and a lawyer and give himself up.

FIVE April 1912—June 1914

THE GALVESTON SUMMERS WERE HOT AND WET AND LITTLE DIFFERent from those he’d known in Florida. The fitful breezes off the Gulf moistly warm as dogbreath. Hordes of mosquitoes. Regular evening rainstorms that flared whitely at the windows and rattled the glassware with their thunder and sometimes became downpours that lasted for days. All such was familiar to him. But winter’s occasional blue northers were an alien brutality that made his teeth ache and burned his face raw and made him think his feet would never again be warm. He’d arrived on a boat from New Orleans, where he’d steamed to out of Tampa. His father had sent word ahead to his sister July of John’s troubles with the Florida laws and asked her to take him in for a time. When he showed up one early afternoon at the front door of her pink two-story clapboard on Post Office Street in a part of town long known as Fat Alley, Aunt July welcomed him warmly. She was a lean darkhaired woman who looked younger than her forty-four years except in the eyes which looked to him to have seen everything. While they took lunch on the back porch off the kitchen she said she had friends who could get him work on the Galveston docks if he was interested. John Ashley said he had given the matter of a job some thought on the voyage from Florida and believed he was well-suited to work for her as what was commonly called a bouncer. “Houseman, we call them,” Aunt July had said, looking surprised,

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“or mostly just the man.” Her gaze turned appraising. “Well, you’re certainly of size for the job,” she said, “but you are awfully young. Besides, the house already has a man.” She turned toward the kitchen and called out, “Hauptmann!” A beefy balding man in a collarless striped shirt and suspenders came to the screen door and looked out at them without expression as he noisily ate an apple. She looked at John Ashley and arched her brow. John Ashley smiled at her and then turned to the man at the door and said, “Hey, Hauptmann, why dont you just get your hat and go? Or if you ruther, you can step out here and we’ll settle who’s man of the house.” Hauptmann’s forehead furrowed and he stopped chewing. Then he snorted and said, “There aint but one man of the house here, sonny, and you lookin at him.” John Ashley stood up and took off his coat and draped it over the porch railing and said, “Come show me.” Aunt July looked from one to the other and said, “Now boys, I wont stand for you either one getting bad hurt. No knives, you hear me?” They stepped down to the weedy courtyard shaded by white-blossomed oleander trees and stripped of their shirts. Girls flocked to the rear windows of both floors to witness the job competition. Hauptmann was the bigger man but he’d grown soft and slow with whorehouse life and in minutes his nose was broken and one of his ears was a ruination and one eye was swelling and closing fast and he told John Ashley he’d had enough. Ten minutes later Aunt July had paid him his wages and he was gone. And John Ashley sat in the kitchen and smiled and had his skinned knuckles tended by a pair of girls as Aunt July explained his duties to him. He rarely had to use force to put anyone off the premises and even then most of the rowdies were too drunk to put up much of a fight and he easily enough muscled them to the side door and pitched them into the alley and their hats after them. When he did have to get tougher a hard hook to the belly or a punch to the neck was usually sufficient to quell all dispute. He had expected a rougher patronage but Aunt July’s regulars were mostly a tame bunch and he now and then found himself wishing some old boy who could scrap would start trouble simply to relieve the boredom. To exercise himself to a sweat he’d several times a week set loose all the chickens in the little coop in the courtyard and then chase them down again to the delight of the spectating girls. The girls were the job’s grand compensation. Eight inmates as they

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called themselves resided in the house and only a couple were older than he and none were less than pretty and nearly all freely available to him when the business hours were done. Besides deferring to his status as the man of the house and as their employer’s favored nephew the girls were anyway attracted to him for his youth and good looks and pleasant Deep South manners—and for the mystery of his past which included the rumor that he’d killed a man. They admired and took comfort in his adeptness at dealing with trouble. He made joyful daily claim on this sexual perquisite during the whole of his first year in Galveston. Only two of the girls would not permit him in their beds—Laraine who was married and truly loved her husband and would not cheat on him by having congress with any other man but a paying customer, and Cindy Jean who said he so much reminded her of her brother Royal back home in Fort Worth that it would feel like the awfulest sin. He took the other six in turn, a different one every night, and so each week had one of them twice—once on Sunday and again the following Saturday. At the dinner table one afternoon Aunt July mock-admonished him for his unflagging concupiscence. “It’s a scientific fact that a man can go crazy doing it as much as you do,” she said. “It’s all that constant friction. Sends way too much heat up your tallywhacker just like a fuse and on up your spinebone and when it reaches your brain, why, it just cooks it like an egg. Too much hokey-pokey has been known to turn a man into a drooling fool fit for nothing but a freak tent.” To which John Ashley raised his face to the dining room ceiling and bayed like a moonstruck hound and his aunt couldn’t help but join in the girls’ laughter. Wiser heads might have warned him that ever-ready pleasures cannot long endure, that sexual indulgence requires respite and even occasional lack in order that its enjoyment not jade. He was young and did not know these things and would anyway not have believed them had he been told and so was obliged to discover their truth for himself. By the end of his first year in Galveston he was beyond surfeit with pleasures of the flesh. He took to waking in the forenoon before the girls arose and slipping out of the house and staying away until early evening and the hour of his employ. At supper the girls began to look at him askance but they held their tongues. Not until he’d kept his distance from them for more than two weeks did a roanhaired inmate named Sally make bold to inquire: “Dont you like us no more, Johnny?” He heard the injury in her voice and saw in her face and in the

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faces of the others that a man’s failure of desire for them was the harshest of rebuffs. He felt mean for making them feel unwanted. “Hey now, girls,” he said, turning up his palms, “I just need a little rest from you all or like Aunt July says I’ll sure enough go loony from way too much of a good thing.” They smiled with ready acceptance of this explanation and winked at each other with relief and fell to their suppers with a happy clatter of dishware. He did resume his visits with the girls but now dallied only twice or thrice a week—often enough to avoid giving further offense but not so often as to glut himself again. He spent the larger portion of his days walking the city and at last acquainting himself with it. He bought a white suit and wore it everywhere against a light blue shirt and black tie and all under a widebrimmed white Panama. He went to the bayside docks and watched the loading and unloading of cargoes of every sort and heard seamen speaking in the tongues of nations whose names he did not know. He daily joined the crowd that gathered every afternoon to see what the fishing boats brought in and one day marveled with them all at a fourteen-foot tiger shark with a girth twice his own as the beast was hung up by its tail and the captain dissected its belly and among the contents to issue onto the dock were a rum bottle and a horseshoe and most of a woman’s bare arm as yet hardly digested and whose finger bore a gold wedding band. The sight reminded him of a time he’d cut open the stomach of a bull gator he’d shot at the south rim of Lake Okeechobee and therein found a boot containing a pale hairy foot. He ambled along the Strand and admired its ornate Victorian architecture and several times attended matinee theater performances and once and only once a matinee at the opera house. He liked walking in the drizzling rain after dark in the misty glow of the streetlamps. He took long noonday strolls along the seawall so recently completed after the hurricane of 1900 that killed 6,000. In the saloons they yet told stories of workgangs impressed at gunpoint and given whiskey rations through the day and night that they might stay halfdrunk and abide the labor of heaving corpses into the towering bonefires on the beach. The fires blazed for weeks and hung the island with a dread and hazy stench. Now the city streets rattled and honked with more than 200 motorcars and pedestrians scurried aside with hardly a glance at them and only the most nervous horses still stamped and kicked at their passing. The speed limit in town was ten miles per hour but there were daring motorists who raced each other on the beach all the way

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to San Luis at the west end of the island. In the parks he watched baseball games and boxing matches and bicyclists and schoolchildren at their gymnastics. He put on a bathing suit in a beach bathhouse and went for long swims in the mirrorsmooth morning sea. And yet, in this his second year of exile in a modern city whose pleasures he could not refute, he could not deny either his increasing yearning for home. He often went fishing from the beach in the afternoons and sometimes thought of Bobby Baker who’d shown him the best places in the Indian River for trout and how to read the weather—taught him that when you saw sand sharks jumping between dawn and sunrise you could look for sporadic southwest winds in about five or six hours, that when the whip rays jumped in the morning you knew a northwester would soon hit and rough up and silt the water, but when the morning cobwebs were thicker than usual you could bet on good weather for fishing out on the salt. John Ashley felt almost friendly toward Bobby Baker in his recollections. He had always considered him a good old boy who seemed to have no lack of grit—as he’d proved on such occasions as the first-fight with his brother Bob and the attempt to arrest them that night at the waycamp, the night he’d sent him home on one leg. But as he cast into the gentle surf one afternoon it occurred to him that Bobby Baker wasn’t likely to forget the humiliations of Julie Morrell and being stripped of his gun and leg. It struck him and Bobby might evermore seek to get even for those public humblings. The notion that Bobby might even be pleased to see him dead came quite suddenly and made him at once melancholic and angry. These feelings confused him and would not dismiss. They persisted for the next several weeks and because he could not say why he felt as he did he became even more nervous and irritable. He twice in one week badly battered troublesome patrons he could easily have handled without letting blood. Aunt July gave him a reprimanding look in the first instance and a severe rebuke after the second, reminding him that she needed no additional difficulties with the police or from some young muckraker’s righteous journalistic denunciations of the whoring trade. He had thought that the fights might soothe his gloomy agitations but they did not. He ached for an action he could not name. One morning just a few days after Aunt July’s scolding he was walking by a bank a block removed from the Strand and chanced to look into the lobby just as a customer was receiving money at a teller’s window. He paused and watched the man tally the bills and then smile and say something to the teller who seemed a sulky young man and who

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showed not a hint of smile in return but simply nodded. The customer folded the money and put it in his coat and came out and gave John Ashley a polite smile in passing. John Ashley glanced at the bulge in the man’s coat pocket and then watched him cross the street and go into a restaurant. Then he looked back into the bank for a long moment, at the polished wood floor gleaming against the yellow sunlight slanting through the windows. He made his way back to the house by a slow roundabout route, noting carefully the lay of every street and alley as he went, stopping in at a pharmacy to buy a small package of gauze and a roll of adhesive tape. By the time he was back at the house his melancholy had lifted, his nervousness dissipated like blown smoke. Early the next morning after the house had turned out its last patron of the night and everyone had gone to bed and only the domestics were moving about at their housekeeping and cooking duties, he cleaned his pistol at the small table by his bedside window and then loaded it. He dressed in his white suit and from his suitcase withdrew a floppybrimmed black felt hat and pair of overalls no one in the house had ever seen and he put them in a large paper sack together with the pistol and the gauze and the roll of tape. He descended the stairs quietly and slipped out the back door and went to the tool shed at the rear of the property. The day was cold enough to show his breath. In the shed he emptied the sack and changed from his white suit into the overalls and tucked his long hair up into the hat. He had let his hair grow nearly to his shoulders because several of the girls had dared him to do so and then all of them had said they preferred it like that. He neatly folded his white suit and put it in the bag and cached it in a corner. He slipped the pistol into the bib pocket of the overalls and then carefully set a wide strip of gauze over his nose and cheekbones and taped it in place. Five minutes after the bank opened for business he walked in and stood at the central counter and on a withdrawal slip wrote “Give me all your paper money.” The guard was a uniformed big-bellied fellow engaged in conversation with a young female clerk at her desk in a corner and the only other customer of the moment was in discussion with the bank manager at his desk at the far end of the room. There was but one other teller on duty and he was busy with a ledger. John Ashley went to the sulky teller’s window and pushed the slip of paper at him. The teller read it and looked up at him and John Ashley leaned close against the counter and exposed enough of the revolver in his bib for the teller to see what it was. Even as the teller’s eyes widened and his mouth came open John

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Ashley smiled and said softly, “Everything’s just fine, bubba, you do like I say. Act natural and don’t holler. Make me any trouble I’ll shoot you graveyard dead. Now gimme it.” The teller did it. He handed over a banded pad of twenty-dollar bills with “$400” imprinted on the band and then several handfuls of loose paper currency of various denominations. John Ashley casually put it all into his overall pockets with the insouciance of a man reaping his just desserts. The teller handed him yet another small stack of bills and said in a quavering whisper, “That’s all I have in my cash drawers, sir, really it is.” John Ashley grinned under his bandaged nose and said, “Well, then, bubba, thats all I’ll take.” The teller looked dazed and for a moment John Ashley thought the man might faint. “Sit down at that desk back of you and just stay there and don’t say nothin to nobody for five minutes, you hear?” He said all this in a low conversational tone and with a broad smile and anyone looking their way would have seen a friendly farmer with an injured nose chatting with a teller who looked but a little more out of sorts than usual. As the teller turned and went to the desk John Ashley left the bank, whistling lowly and waving so long at the guard and feeling his heart banging against his ribs as if trying to make its own wild escape ahead of him. He steeled himself to walk at a normal pace as he made his way along the serpentine route he’d laid out through the alleys. At every step of the way he expected to hear police whistles suddenly shrilling behind him and shouted commands to stand fast and put up his hands. And then he was back in the shed and the gauze was off his face and he quickly changed into his white suit and stuffed the overalls and the hat in the paper sack and hid it behind a nail barrel in the corner. He put the money in his coat pockets and then went into the house and up to his room. In response to the look of curiosity he received from the cleaning women on the stairs he said, “Forgot my pipe.” He counted the money out on the bed—one thousand two hundred and seventy-two dollars, most of it in twenties and tens and no bill larger than a fifty, of which there five. He counted all of it again and laughed out loud. He felt better than he had in weeks—even as his heart yet pounded and he tasted now the brassy flavor of the apprehension he’d been holding in tight check all morning. He wanted to howl his elation. He divided the money into four even piles and rolled them tightly and stuffed them into a spare pair of boots and then went for a long walk on the seawall. He could not stop grinning.

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By the time the house sat down to dinner that afternoon the news of the robbery was all over town. The talk at the table was all about it and the bold broken-nosed farmer who’d done it and got away. The most popular sentiment among the girls was the hope that the hayseed would come to the house to spend some of his loot. “I’ll show him how to do a damn stick-up like he aint never done,” Cindy Jean said, and all the girls laughed. John Ashley laughed with them. The girls had several times remarked on his high spirit all afternoon and some now wondered aloud as to its cause. He told them he just felt good being in their company, that was all, and they grinned and blew kisses at him. It was all he could do to keep from bragging to them that he’d committed the crime. But he knew too well the whores’ love of gossip and knew that if he confided in even one of them about the holdup they would all soon know the story and so would others outside the house. He felt cheated that he could not crow about it to anybody. Two months later his euphoria from the robbery had ebbed and he found himself standing across the street from a Broadway Avenue bank and considering the possibilities. He decided that yes, he could take this one too. He thought about it for the next few days and was almost decided on doing it when a telegram arrived from his father: “Get home. Gordy says all will be well.” Gordy was Gordon Blue, attorney-at-law with offices in Palm Beach and Chicago and an occasional partner of Joe Ashley dating back to their days in Lee County. The girls were sorry to see him go. The night before his departure Aunt July threw a party and hired a dance band to play in the crowded parlor and each girl in turn took him aside and kissed him goodbye and petted him and whispered endearments. He three times went upstairs with a different girl each time including Cindy Jean who said she didnt care anymore how much he looked like her brother. When he boarded the steamer next morning he was redeyed with hangover and exhausted to the marrow and his flayed peeter pained him in his pants. Yet he grinned wide as he stood at the rail in the cold wind and returned the goodbye waves of the girls on the dock. Then the ship cleared the channel and entered the silver-green Gulf and he watched Galveston recede in the wake and he told himself that if he should ever have to live someplace other than Florida he would come back to this old island. Under a sunwashed sky laced with white clouds a school of dolphin rolled up beside the ship like old friends attending him home.

SIX July 1914

ON A CLEAR HOT SUMMER SUNDAY JUST DAYS AFTER JOHN ASHLEY debarked at Tampa and was driven home to Twin Oaks by his brother Bob, the family celebrated his return with a great feast and invited every friendly acquaintance in the county. In the shade of the wide live oaks whole pigs crackled and dripped from their spits above open fires tended by Old Joe’s Negro help. Huge racks of beef ribs sizzled on thick iron grills over firepits. Puncheon tables held heaping platters of smoked mullet, roast backstrips of venison, fried catfish, skin-crisped sweet potatoes. There were huge steaming kettles of clams, of oysters, of corn on the cob, of seasoned swamp cabbage which is the heart of palm. There were pots of grits and of greens of several kinds, bowls of hush puppies, baskets of boiled turtle eggs. There was cornbread, flour biscuits, Seminole bread made of coontie starch. There were jars of molasses, jellies of guava and strawberry and seagrape. There were barrels of mangoes and limes. Several tables held kegs of beer and Old Joe had brought in a wagonload of his best jugged whiskey. The huge party ate and drank, talked and laughed and told tales of every sort. It danced to the music of a string band out of Stuart and Old Joe took a turn with them on his fiddle and Bill Ashley plunked his banjo for several sets. Children ran about in shrieking play or danced at the periphery of the packed-dirt clearing where the adults reeled and waltzed and square-danced and dogs ran yapping through

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the crowd. A dozen smoking smudge pots stood at intervals between the house and the surrounding swamp to keep down the mosquitoes. John Ashley sat at one end of the family table and Old Joe at the other. Bob Ashley sat by John and told him about Bob Baker’s recent marriage. “She’s a Georgia girl,” he said. “They say she’s real nice. I saw her in West Palm one time. Goodlookin thing—way too goodlookin for the likes of him. I figure she musta took pity on him is why she married him. Maybe she figured a one-legged man wouldnt never get nobody to marry him and she just felt good and sorry for him.” “Maybe she was just good and drunk,” John Ashley said. “Maybe she’s just good and dumb,” Bob said. He leaned closer and lowered his voice and said, “But look here, Johnny, tell me more about Aunt July’s.” With them sat their twelve-year-old nephew Hanford Mobley who idolized both these uncles who treated him like the young man he believed he already was. Earlier that day they had let him go with them into the pineywoods to watch them have a shooting contest. They had fired twelve shots each at pine cones they lined up on a fallen trunk and John had won by a score of twelve cones to eleven and laughingly claimed that all the pussy he’d had these past two years had made his shooting eye even sharper than it always was. John then let Hanford Mobley have a turn with his pistol and the brothers stood astonished to discover that their slight small-boned nephew who had to use both hands to aim the big. .44 was a natural-born deadeye. The boy hit all twelve cones he shot at and didnt stop beaming the rest of the day. When they told old Joe about it he said of his grandson, “Hell yeah that sprout can shoot. Been thataway since he was eight or so. He’s a good one, that little fella. Aint afraid a the devil hisself neither. You ought see how he can use a knife.” Now John Ashley grinned at his brother’s insistence on hearing more about his lickerish life at their aunt’s house in Galveston. “Hell, brother,” he said, “I done told you all there is to tell.” He ran a hand over the unfamiliar feel of the exposed back of his neck, which showed as pale as the narrow strip of shaved skin above each ear. The first thing Old Joe had said on seeing him after his absence of nearly two years was, “Boy, I dont what-all they think of hair like that on a man in Texas, but round here they wont know whether to kick your ass or kiss you. Ma! Get me the shears and razor!” John Ashley had also told Bob earlier about the Galveston bank robbery. His brother had whooped and clapped him on the shoulder and called him a laying sack. John then took him into his room at the

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rear of the house and pulled a suitcase from under the bed and opened it and showed his brother the more than one thousand dollars that yet remained of the take. Bob’s big-eyed flabbergast struck him as comic and he laughed and said, “Lying sack, hey?” Bob asked what in purple hell had possessed him to rob a damn bank, and John tried to explain about the mixed-up feeling he’d had when he was fishing on the beach one day and thought about Bobby Baker holding a lifetime grudge and maybe even wanting him dead. Tried to explain his frustration over not knowing what to do about it but that he felt he had to do something, something daring, even though he couldn’t say why. “Hell, I dont know,” John Ashley said. “I dont know why I did it. All I know is I felt pretty damn good after.” “You just up and decided that robbin a bank was a way to make yourself feel better, hey?” Bob said, grinning. “Shitfire, I guess it’s lots of fellas’d feel better about things if they got away with robbin a bank.” John Ashley said, “Well…yeah.” He was not sure he could ever explain the thing clearly even to himself. And so he changed the subject: “Let me tell you about somethin that damn sure makes any man feel a whole lot better, bubba. I mean, it’s some nice little business Aunt July’s got there….” And now Bob still had not heard enough about their aunt’s establishment in Texas and his brother’s time in it. “Was you tellin me true?” he said in low voice, glancing down the table to ensure no ear other than young Hanford Mobley’s was listening in. “About havin run of the place? You really and truly could have any them girls you wanted?” “Any damn time they wasnt workin on the house clock,” John Ashley said. “You lyin sack,” Bob Ashley said, grinning hugely. “I had me my first piece last month,” young Hanford Mobley said. “Wasnt nothin so dang special.” His uncles turned to him and said together, “You lyin sack!” and the boy reddened with his lie and he shrugged and could not restrain his grin. At the other end of the table Old Joe as holding forth about the stupidities of the legal system. He had over the past two years grown steadily angrier that his son was being forced to live apart from his family for no reason but having killed some Indian. “The law,” Old Joe said, “is a goddamned horse’s ass.” “Hear, hear,” said Gordon Blue, raising his glass in a toast. The dapper goateed lawyer was the only person present wearing a suit and

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tie. The day before, he and Old Joe had explained to John Ashley how they intended to get him out from under the law’s deep shadow. “If your daddy here hadnt kept it from me for so long that he knew where you were and how much he wanted to have you back home,” Gordon Blue had said, “we wouldve had you back long before now.” He gave Old Joe a sidewise look. “But nooo. Joe couldnt bring himself to trust anyone, not even Old Gordy, no matter that I’ve helped him a time or two in worse trouble than this. Couldnt tell me about it till a few weeks ago, could you Joseph?” Old Joe’s smile was small. “I dont know why the whole thing wasnt plain to me as the nose on my face till I talked to Gordy about it,” he said to John Ashley. “The simple fact is, they got to give you a jury trial—and what jury’s gonna convict you in Palm Beach County? Besides, the state’s havin trouble findin their main witness, aint they? The only ones to testify against you will be Sheriff George and them who heard the breed accuse you. But aint nobody seen that breed since you been gone—or goin to, neither.” Bob Ashley chuckled and said, “I dont guess he’s gonna do any testifyin, no sir.” On the drive home from Tampa, he had proudly recounted to John Ashley how he’d tracked down Jimmy Gopher in the Everglades and put a round through his head at nearly two hundred yards. John Ashley had looked at him partly in surprise that he could speak so easily of having killed a man and partly in admiration of the same thing—and of his utter confidence in having done the right thing. Bob said, “Hell man, he’d of spoke against you in court. It wasnt nothin else to do. What the hell, man, he anyway had it comin.” “The point is,” Old Joe now said, “most ever man in the county’s on our side in this thing and thats a fact. Aint none at em gonna say you guilty if they get on the jury.” John Ashley looked at his brothers gathered by the door and listening and all of them grinning except Bill the elder who never was one to smile except sometimes when playing his banjo. He turned to his father and said, “Not everybody in the county’s our friend, Daddy. What if some of them get on the jury?” “I wouldn’t be too concerned about that,” Gordon Blue said. “There’s a story been going around for months that this Gopher fellow who accused you to the police was set upon in the Everglades by persons unknown who were sympathetic to your cause. Supposedly he was dismembered with an ax and his remains fed to the alligators.” Gordon Blue made a face of distaste and gave a little theatrical shiver and then smiled widely. “Although the story isnt true, it is true that

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this person seems to have fallen off the earth, and I suspect that no potential juror will be able to completely ignore the possible implications of the tale.” The Ashley men all looked at one another and grinned. Gordon Blue smiled and poured a touch of bourbon from his gilded flash into his cup and then took a small sip. He cleared his throat and said to John Ashley: “It’s all arranged. Tomorrow your father and I deliver you to Sheriff George Baker at the county jail in West Palm. The trial opens on Tuesday, so you’ll be there only one day before is starts and then for only as long as it lasts, which I dont believe will be very long. Sheriff George has also agreed that you wont be handcuffed on your promise not to attempt escape.” He paused to light a cigarette, one of the tailormade Chesterfields he bought by the case in Chicago. He exhaled a blue plume of smoke and smiled at John Ashley. “In a week, two at the most, you’ll be free and clear.” And so Old Joe had laid out that Sunday’s repast at Twin Oaks for all local friends of the family, all of whom were in John Ashley’s jury pool. And on that Sunday afternoon John Ashley ate and drank and danced and swapped stories with his brothers. And after sundown he and Bob drove to West Palm Beach and went to Miss Lillian’s. The madam was surprised to tears to see him again and greeted him like the Prodigal returned. Then he went upstairs and tiptoed to Loretta May’s room and looked in the open door and saw the tub of steaming water before he saw her sitting in a yellow shimmy at the window and facing out into the darkness. Her blonde hair had grown to below her shoulder blades but the breeze through the window carried to him her familiar smell of peaches. He thought her more beautiful than ever and was content to stand there in silence and look upon her. Without turning she said, “About time you got here, you bad ole gator-skinner you.” He grinned and felt himself flush, as though she’d caught him at something sneaky. “How’d you know I was standin here? How’d you know it was me?” She laughed like a small bell and stood and turned smiling and opened her arms to him. After the bath and the powdering and after they’d made love twice they lay entwined and smoked cigarettes and spoke very little. When they’d first met he’d asked her what pleasure she got out of smoking

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since she couldn’t see the smoke and she’d said, “I cant?”—a response that so confused him he let the question go. Now he was surprised that she did not ask where he’d been these past two years. And yet, somehow, he felt she knew. “I done somethin while I was away,” he whispered, feeling strangely as if he were asking a question of her as much as telling her something. “Somethin I hadnt ever done before.” She nuzzled his neck and murmured, “I know. Made the world spin a little faster for a while, huh? Made everything a little more excitin.” He drew back so he could look into her face in the weak reflected light of the torches in the courtyard below the window. Her eyes were shut. “You know what I done?” he said. “You dont know what I done.” She opened her eyes and turned her face toward him. “Yes I do—and I know more than that, boy. I even know what you’re gonna do. Bet you a dollar I know what you gonna do.” “Cant nobody shine the future. That ain’t but swamp nigger hoodoo.” She felt for his face and put her fingers to his lips and said, “You’re gonna have a real good time with a blind girl real soon is what you’re gonna do. Now, you think I’m wrong?” He grinned under her fingers and then she grinned too. She sat up and straddled his thighs and her hands stroked him and in an instant he was ready. She moved up and fit herself onto him and brought his hands up to her breasts as she slowly rolled her hips. he groaned with pleasure. “I guess,” she said, “I won me a bet.” “Lord girl,” he gasped, “I believe you sure enough got what they call the sight.” She giggled and worked herself hard against him. They laughed and made love deep into the night. And in the morning he went to jail. The jailhouse was a single-story stone-and-concrete structure surrounded by a fence of chickenwire eight feet high and set thirty yards from the building all the way around. Sheriff George Baker met them at the gate. He and Gordon Blue exchanged a few official words and each man signed a paper and then the sheriff smiled at John Ashley and said, “How do, John. Been a while. You lookin fit.” “What say, Sheriff George,” John Ashley said. He reached into

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the motorcar and withdrew the freshly cleaned white suit he would wear in court. Then he stood before his father and they looked at each other for a moment and then Old Joe turned to Sheriff George and said, “You wont to takin him to court in handcuffs you said. It’s the deal.” “Not as long as he gives me his word he wont try and escape,” Sheriff George said. “You got it, sir,” John Ashley said. Sheriff George nodded and said, “Well then, let’s get inside.” John Ashley looked at his father and Old Joe said, “Go on now. You’ll be out quick enough and we’ll be done with this horseshit.” John Ashley nodded and then followed the sheriff up the walk to the jail. Sheriff George rapped on the heavy front door with its iron knocker and there came the sound of metal sliding on metal and a loud clack and the door swung open. The entered into an administration room containing a few scattered desks and filing cabinets. There were two uniformed policemen in the room. One was a clerk working at a typewriter, and the other, sitting in a swivel chair with his booted feet crossed on the desk, was Bobby Baker. He was smoking a cigar and grinning at John Ashley. “That’s Norman,” Sheriff George said, indicating the clerk. “Hang your suit on that wallhook yonder and empty your pockets on Norman’s desk. We’ll give you the suit in the morning for court.” He saw John Ashley staring at Bob Baker and said, “Bobby’s jailer now.” “Hello, John,” Bob Baker said. “How you keepin?” “Just fine, Bobby. How about youself?” “Well hell, never better,” Bob Baker said. He saw that Bob Baker’s brown boots were new and low-cut in the style that civil engineers favored and each was embossed with a white star on the instep. A portion of wooden ankle was visible under the real ankle crossed over it. He seemed to have grown larger since John Ashley had last seen him—not fatter but thicker through the chest and arms. His face looked harder, his eyes. His hair was thick as ever. He held the cigar in his right hand and the knuckles were freshly skinned. He laughed at John Ashley’s scrutiny of him. “By the way, John,” he said through a blue billow of smoke, “you owe me a gun.” “Any man loses his gun to another aint never owed it back,” John Ashley said. Bob Baker’s smile held but his face assumed a rosy tint. Norman the clerk looked over and saw their eyes and quickly looked away.

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Sheriff George glanced at them with his brows raised. “Do like I said, John.” John Ashley hung up his suit and then emptied his pockets on the desktop—some coins, seven dollars in bills, a sack of tobacco and cigarette papers, a box of matches, and a pocket knife. Norman pushed the tobacco and papers and matches back to John Ashley and carefully counted the money and entered the total amount on a property slip and made notation too of the pocket knife. Then he took a large brown envelope from a desk drawer and wrote John Ashley’s name on it in tall letters with a fountain pen and put the money and the knife in it and sealed it and put it back in the drawer. Sheriff George headed for a door on the other side of the room and said, “Come along here, Johnny.” John Ashley followed and Bob Baker got up from the desk and came behind. The door opened to the jail’s cell block in the center of which was a single steel-barred cell that looked exactly like a cage about the size and shape of a railroad car. It was illuminated from above by three dangling electric light bulbs and contained a row of double-tiered bunk beds and a two-hole board over low rough-hewn cabinets in which the shitcans were set. In addition there were a half-dozen smaller cells built into the rear stone wall, the door to each one open wide and showing them to be empty. The room smelled of waste and disinfectant and was ventilated only by whatever fitful breezes might come through the small barred windows set high in the walls. At the moment only two other prisoners were in the main cell. The sheriff unlocked the door and John Ashley entered the cage and the sheriff locked the door behind him. “Breakfast six o’clock, Johnny,” she sheriff said as he started for the door. He paused and looked back at Bob Baker, who was lingering near the cage. “I’ll be along, Daddy,” Bob Baker said. “Dont devil the boy, son,” Sheriff George said, and then went out in the front room. John Ashley stood near the bars with his hands in his pockets and watched Bobby Baker roll a cigarette and light it. One of the other prisoners was standing against the far wall of bars, smoking and gazing at his hand closed around a bar and paying them no attention. The other inmate lay in an upper bunk with an arm over his eyes. Now Bobby leaned on one elbow against the cell bars and smiled at John Ashley. “Tell me somethin, Johnny: you ever see a man hung?” he asked.

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“Yeah I have,” John Ashley said. “Just after, anyway.” “A nigger, right?” “Hard to say. By the time I saw him he’d been burned up so bad he didnt look like much of anything but a big chunk of charcoal.” “That’s a nigger lynchin sure,” Bob Baker said. “I mean you ever seen a white man hung?” “Guess not.” Bob Baker smiled and took a drag on his cigarette. “I have,” he said. “Up in Saint Lucie County Jail, about a year ago. They hung a old boy for murder. Killed his partner in a moonshine business—cut his head off with a cane knife—and they gave him the rope. They built a gallows back of the jailhouse and before dawn they stood the fella up there and asked him did he have any last words and he just shook hid head. I’d been told he was a rough old boy but up on that gallows he didnt seem all that tough. Looked too scared to open his mouth—like he might of started cryin if he did. They put hood over his head and you could see the cloth suckin in and out against his mouth he was breathin so hard. His neck was sposed to break when they dropped him through the door but it didnt. They say thats what happens more than half the time, the neck dont break like it ought, and what happens then is the fella chokes to death. You shoulda seen the way he was jerkin and kickin ever which way, just like a damn fish on a hook. Makin sounds all wet and choky like water going down a mostly clogged drain. I bet he was gaggin and kicking for five minutes before he finally give up the ghost. And the smell! Lord Jesus! He couldnt help but shit his pants—I’m told they all do. But that aint the half of it, listen to this: the sumbuck got a hard on! I aint lyin. He got this boner in his pants you could see from all the way cross the room. They say some of em even shoot off and you can see the stain on their pants. Aint that a hoot? I mean to tell you, Johnny, hanging is just about the most godawful humiliatin way in the world for a man to die.” Bob Baker leaned closer against the bars and said softly: “When they find you guilty, John, that’s what’s gonna happen to you.” He smiled genially, his aspect all bonhomie, then took a deep pull on his cigarette and dropped the butt on the floor and ground it under his heel. “Thought you might wanna have somethin to think about between now and then,” he said through an exhalation of smoke. “Well dont get too way ahead of youself, Bobby,” John Ashley said, forcing a grin. “I aint hung yet. But I tell you what—even if they

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did hang me, leastways I’d still be able to stand up there on my own two legs, which is more than I can say for some.” Bob Baker’s smile twitched and he blinked quickly several times. He stepped back from the bars—and then suddenly laughed like he’d been told a good joke. He put a fist to the side of his neck and then jerked the first straight up as though yanking on a noose and he crooked his head and struck out his tongue and crossed his eyes. He was still laughing as he went out the door. The morning dawned hot and humid. To either side of the rising sun low heavy clouds looked streaked with fire. The courtroom filled early and the small room was murmurous with excitement as spectators fanned themselves against the heat. A weakling breeze sagged through the courtroom’s tall windows. A growing line of prospective jurors was already crowding the hallways and many of the veniremen were forced to wait outside in the shade of trees. Now the bailiff announced that court was in session, the Honorable H. P. Branning presiding. Gordon Blue had informed the Ashleys that Circuit Court Judge Branning had a reputation for no-nonsense legal proceeding, a factor in their own favor. “Gramling’s going to challenge so many of the jury candidates,” Blue had told Joe Ashley, referring to John Gramling, the state prosecutor, “that he’ll use up all his peremptories by tomorrow. In the meantime Branning will get his fill of him for slowing things down so much. By the time the jury’s seated we’ll have them and the judge on our side.” And so did the first day of the trial go. Of the twenty juror candidates questioned, Gramling challenged seventeen and did not seem happy with the other three. Gordon Blue challenged none. Near the end of the day Judge Branning called both lawyers to the bench and asked the state’s attorney whether he intended to continue to weight down the proceedings with still more challenges tomorrow. “The peremptory is not an infinite privilege, Mr. Gramling,” the judge said. Gramling said he was fully aware of that—and aware as well that every potential juror so far, with a single exception, was a friend of the Ashleys, and the one exception was so clearly intimidated by the family he couldnt even look the defendant in the eye and could hardly be relied on to be impartial. The judge looked at Gordon Blue who shrugged in the manner of one baffled utterly by the state’s argument. After warning Gramling not to test his patience the judge adjourned court for the day. As Bob Baker led John Ashley by an arm toward a side exit, John

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Ashley looked over at his family seated behind the defense table. His father nodded to him and his mother and sisters blew kisses and the twin brothers Frank and Ed each showed him a fist of encouragement. Bill was scribbling in a notebook—having been recruited as a secretarial assistant by Gordon Blue. Bob Ashley shouted, “We gone beat em, Johnny!” Then he was outside and in Bob Baker’s Model T and they were clattering down the road on the short drive back to jail. As when they’d come to court in the car that morning—he in his fresh white suit and Bob Baker in a starched uniform and wearing his holstered and strapped-down pistol on the side away from John Ashley—they made the ride in silence. The following day was mostly a repetition of the first—one venireman after another was eliminated from the jury pool by Gramling’s peremptories. Judge Branning’s irritation grew. When he recessed for lunch he brought the gavel down like he was trying to break it. The early afternoon saw still more candidates dismissed by Gramling’s challenges. The judge drummed his fingers. The sky framed in the windows began to darken with gathering clouds. The wind kicked up and carried on it the smell of the coming storm and brought to the courtroom some relief from the stifling heat. Thunder rolled in the distance. The first scattered raindrops were smacking the roof and the raised shutters when Gramling at last used up the last of his peremptory challenges. The judge heaved a theatrical sigh and said perhaps they could now proceed at quicker pace. But Gramling then filed a motion for change of venue, citing the pertinent statutes permitting the action. He wanted the trial moved to Dade County, where, he argued, there was much better chance for the state to seat an impartial jury. Judge Branning rubbed his face with his hands and said he’d take the motion under advisement and rule on it first thing in the morning. Gordon Blue muttered. “Damn!” and the look on his face made John Ashley’s chest go tight. The judge motioned the bailiff to the bench for a private word with him. John Ashley wondered if Blue had considered that the judge might get so fed up with Gramling he’d let the trial go elsewhere. His father was whispering to Bill in obvious agitation as his other three sons leaned in to listen. Blue patted John Ashley’s shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, they cant do this.” He began gathering his papers.

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“I’m going to talk with your daddy. I’ll see you in the lockup later.” The judge banged his gavel and adjourned for the day. In the clamor of voices that rose behind the judge’s exit from the room, John Ashley was suddenly certain the trial was going to go to Dade County—to Miami—to a jury of complete strangers. His mother scowled at John Gramling who took no notice as he gathered his papers. Old Joe was listening to Bill. Bob waved to catch John Ashley’s attention and pointed at Bob Baker who was talking to the bailiff. John Ashley did not understand what Bob was signifying but Bob and Frank and Ed were already hastening from the courtroom. Bob Baker came over and took him by the arm and said, “Let’s go.” The rain was coming down hard now and they were sodden by the time they reached the open-sided Ford. John got in and Bob Baker cranked the motor and then got in and adjusted the spark lever and they started back to the jail. The air shook with thunder and the sky was rent bright with lightning. The trees whipped in the wind. They drove along in the jouncing car with mud slapping up under the floorboards. John Ashley stared glumly at the gray world passing and felt that all matters of import to him had already been decided and none of them in his favor. With the storm had come an early twilight. Sheets of water swept across the narrow road and soaked them all the more in the open car. The jailhouse came into view, the light above the door already on and glowing hazy yellow in the gloom. John Ashley cut his eyes everywhere but saw no sign of deliverance. Bob Baker parked the car alongside the fence gate and cut off the motor which chugged for several more revolutions before shutting down. Wisps of steam issued from under the hood covers. John Ashley slid out of the car and scanned the area as Bobby worked a key into the gate lock. “Come on!” Bob Baker hollered through a crash and roll of thunder, beckoning irritably as he swung open the gate. John Ashley entered the compound and Bobby re-locked the gate and they slogged through the mud up to the jailhouse which loomed now in John Ashley’s eyes like an enormous crypt. As Bob Baker reached for the iron knocker to summon Norman to unlock the door John Ashley acted on his impulse of the moment and grabbed him from behind in a headlock and wrestled him away from the entry. Bob Baker snarled a muffled curse under John Ashley’s arm and

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became a bucking writhing frenzy trying with both hands to break free. But John Ashley held the arm clamped round his head as hard as he could and they reeled and staggered and splashed about like mad dancers in the muddy rain. And now Bob Baker was clawing at John Ashley’s binding arm with one hand and trying to unholster his pistol with the other and John Ashley got the leverage and purchase he was struggling for and lunged toward the jail wall and rammed the crown of Bob Baker’s head against it. Bobby went slack and sagged full weight in the vise of his arm and John Ashley feared he might have killed him. So tightly was his arm locked that he had to force it open with his other hand before he could let Bob Baker fall. He stood gasping, massaging his aching arm, watching the jailhouse door in expectation of Norman’s appearance, but the door remained shut. The wind had died of a sudden and the rain was falling straight down and spattering high and loud. He saw now that Bobby’s face was in the mud and if he was not already dead he was going to drown. He knelt and pushed him onto his side and Bob Baker sucked a huge muddy mouthful of air. He was yet unconscious and blood ran from his hair and rubied the mud under his head. The hold-down strap of his holster was unfastened and John Ashley for the second time in their lives relieved him of his gun, once again a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson. He checked the loads and then stuck the pistol in his waistband. “Johnny!” He looked to the yard gate and saw his brothers Bob and Ed coming on the run, each time pistol in hand, and behind them, in the driving rain, a shimmying Model T emitted vague smoke from its exhaust pipe and Frank was behind the wheel and was looking out for anyone coming from either direction in the road. Bob kicked and kicked at the gate lock and John Ashley was about to yell out for him to hold on, he’d get the gate key out of Bobby’s pocket, but Ed was already backing up a dozen feet and now running at the fence and throwing his full weight against it and a fifteen-foot portion of chickenwire ripped off its support posts and scooped down into the mud as Ed sprawled on the fallen fence and regained his feet and here came Bob behind him laughing raucously and yelling, “Whooo! Some damn jail, aint it? Fucken Chickenwire!” They clapped him on the shoulder and grinned hugely and he felt himself grinning back. “We’d been here waitin to jump the sonofabitch,” Ed said, “but Frankie run off the road about a quarter-mile back and it took a while to get the machine out the damn ditch.”

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“He dead?” Bob asked, nudging Bobby Baker with his toe. Bob Baker groaned but his eyes were still closed. “You all get back to the car,” John Ashley said. “Best he dont see you here. Go on now.” “Hell, I aint scared of this mullethead,” Bob said. “Let him see me all he wants.” “It’s got nothin to do with bein scared of him, Bob,” John Ashley said. “Right now he aint got a thing on any you, only me. Let’s keep it that way. Get on to the car and I be right there. I want a word with this sumbitch.” “He’s right,” Ed said, tugging on Bob’s sleeve. “C’mon, let’s get.” Bob spat and hustled his balls and looked from one to the other of them and said, “Well all right, hell,” and went off with Ed through the rain and over the downed portion of fence and got in the car with Frank. John Ashley knelt and turned Bobby Baker on his back and shook him by the shoulder and patted his face and tugged repeatedly on his ears and in a moment Bobby coughed wetly and choked and rolled toward John Ashley who jumped up and away to avoid the gush of vomit he heaved up. Bobby gasped and opened his eyes and saw John Ashley grinning down at him. He started to sit up but John Ashley put his foot against his shoulder and pushed him onto his back again. “Just you stay there.” “Son…bitch,” Bobby muttered. He managed to get up on all fours before John Ashley kicked him in the ribs and the air whooshed out of him and he fell on his side with eyes wide and blood running from his hair and down the side of his face and his mouth working for breath. John Ashley squatted and grabbed a fistful of his hair and turned his face up into the rain. “So I’m gonna hang, hey?” John Ashley said. “Gonna shit my pants? I told you not to get so ahead of yourself, didnt I?” He yanked Bob Baker over onto his stomach and pushed his face into the mud for several seconds and then yanked his head up again by the hair. Bob Baker snorted and spat mud and tried weakly to wrest free and John Ashley punched him in the back of the neck. “I wouldn’t try and make a fight of it just now, I was you,” he said. A piercing whistle he recognized as Bob’s cut through the rain and he looked at the idling Ford. The rain was falling harder now and he could see his brothers as only vague forms within the car and he knew Bobby would not recognize them if he should look their way. Bob

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Baker cursed lowly and tried to pull John’s hand off his hair and roll over. John Ashley released him and got to his feet and thought to kick him again but the sight of his bloody head and the sound of his gasping decided him against it. The man was beat, so let him lay. He turned and ran for the fence and clambered over the skewed chickenwire and loped to the car and the open door waiting for him. And Bob Baker, bleeding and breathless in the mud, heard him laughing and laughing as he made away. He confided the details of the escape to no one but his father, and in addition to the warrants on John Ashley for murder and escape from custody, Sheriff George Baker had also wanted one for assault on a police officer. But Bob Baker did not want the assault known publicly and his father had deferred to his wish that they keep it to themselves. In his official report Bob Baker asserted that John Ashley had broken his word not to escape and bolted away into the rainy darkness when they got back to the jailyard from the courthouse. He said he could have shot him down but he was not one to shoot an unarmed man, not even a fleeing prisoner, not if he had not yet been convicted of a crime. Because he did not remove his hat in public during the entire time he wore a bandage on his crown, no one but his father and his wife Annie—who’d been the one to tend his wound—ever saw evidence of the beating he’d taken. As she ministered to his bloody scalp Annie had asked what happened but he’d only looked at her and she’d questioned him no further. She’d come to know him for a moody man best left alone when withdrawn into himself. That night he made love to her despite the pain of his throbbing head—made love with a passion near to ferocity and the woman in his mind was not his wife but a girl long gone. Two months later Annie happily informed him that she was carrying a child. He was delighted and said they would name it after his father. Annie made a mock face of distaste but said all right, but if it was a girl she wanted to name it after her favorite aunt. Bob Baker said fine, whatever the name it was fine with him. Annie’s smile at him then had been wide and warm and full of love. “Good,” she said. “I just love the name Julie.” Seven months later she gave birth to the girl. Bob Baker smiled on his wife in the hospital room and gingerly cuddled the infant in his arms and cooed to her and called her his pretty little bird and evermore called her by that nickname rather than her Christian name. If his

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wife or the girl herself were ever curious about that, they neither one ever said. Although John Ashley remained in the region, the Palm Beach sheriff was hard-pressed to arrest him. When Dade County went dry the year before, Joe Ashley’s moonshine business boomed, and now John Ashley was making regular runs to Miami to deliver his daddy’s hooch. Sheriff George knew that. But he was not on friendly terms with the Dade County sheriff and the Ashley family was. And he’d heard enough tales about the corruption in the Miami Police Department to know it would be useless to ask for its help. There were steady reports of John Ashley sightings in the local region too—mostly in its portion of the Everglades. He was seen at Indian villages and at fishing and hunting camps from the north shore of Lake Okeechobee to the south end of the Loxahatchee Slough. But Sheriff George knew there was as much chance of catching John Ashley in the Devil’s Garden as there was of catching a hawk on the wing. He figured his best chance for an arrest would at the Ashley homestead, and so he posted a continuous surveillance on the Twin Oaks house. His deputies made their way to the Ashley property on foot through the piney swamp and took up positions among the trees from which they had a good view of the front of the house some forty yards distant. They reported seeing all the other Ashleys come and go at irregular intervals but never spied John among them. One late evening a pair of motorcar headlamps came waggling along the trail leading from the highway to the Twin Oaks property and the two mosquito-plagued policeman watching from their post in the pines nudged each other excitedly and jacked rounds into their rifles. Then the front door of the house swung open and laid out a shaft of yellow lamplight bearing the elongated shadow of Ma Ashley as she came out to the top of the porch steps. She raised a shotgun and discharged both flaring barrels into the sky as if bent on felling the bright crescent moon. The carlights halted and swung about through the trees as the car wheeled tightly in reverse and then the lights extinguished and the two cops stood in the darkness and listened to the motor fade into the distance. And they heard too Ma Ashley’s laughter as she went back into the house with her shadow following behind and the length of jaundiced lamplight scooted after her just ahead of the shutting door.

SEVEN The Liars Club

MIAMI WASNT BUT ABOUT FIFTEEN, SIXTEEN YEARS OLD WHEN THE Ashleys started running whiskey down there. The damn town was a flat crazy place right from the start and never did lack for grifters and gamblers and highrollers and bad actors of all sorts. It wasnt many crackers liked Miami and its ways but the Ashley boys was among them that did. Since the turn of the century somebody or other had been dredging canals between Lake Okeechobee and the Atlantic with the idea of draining the Everglades and creating a lot more acreage to sell. Before you could say “Sign right here on the dotted line,” Miami was full of sharpies making money off that scheme. The first dredge boilers were just getting fired up when the sharpies started advertising virgin farmland for sale in the northern newspapers and a bunch of fool Yankees started buying it through the mail, sight unseen. Hell, they couldnt of seen it if they wanted to—most of what was being sold was still under water, and a lot of it would stay that way. The dumbshits were paying for it by the acre but really buying it by the quart. The sort of conniving was routine stuff up through the boom of the 1920s when it got worse than ever—and then a hellacious hurricane blew away a lot of the enthusiasm for Miami and South Florida for a while. When they started digging the Miami Canal the engineers built a dam to hold the water back until the job was done. Once the canal was dug out to the Glades, they dynamited the dam to let the water

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run out and, Lord amighty, did it ever! Water come pouring out of the Glades like some terrible punishment from the Bible. It rushed on down the canal to the Miami River and overran the banks in some places and knocked down sheds and shacks and boat stands and it grabbed up dogs and pigs and anybody who didnt get out the way quick enough and just carried everything it picked up right on down to the bay and dumped it in there and turned that pure blue baywater the ugliest shitbrown you ever saw. The water kept pouring down that canal for weeks. Made a godawful mess. Then come the dry season and way out where the swamp had been drained the muck got drier than it was ever meant to be and just any old spark would set it afire. The grass for miles around would catch fire too and the trees would get burnt to black skeletons and the muck would just go on burning and burning and at night you could see the sky glowing orange way out in the Devil’s Garden. The smoke would drift in on the wind and turn and high noon sun red as blood and sometimes got so thick you couldnt hardly tell high noon from dawn or dusk. For weeks at a time everybody in town went around with their eyes watering and their throats sore and scratchy from breathing that muck smoke. To make things worse the fires would drive all kinds of critters out of the swamp and there was times when Miami was just overrun with animals getting away from the flames—possums and coons, rats big as cats. You’d see a dozen rattlesnakes a day right in the damn streets. If a little baby in a stroller so much as gave his rattle a shake people would jump a foot in the air and look all wild-about for snakes at their feet. Alligators would come downriver in bunches like timber logs. But hell, the gators was even worse in the wet season, the cottonmouths too. That’s when the streets, would flood with the rain running off the burnt-up Glades like water off a bare table. As for them who bought land that actually did get drained, well, they set to farming on it and at first they was all excited to see how high the sugarcane grew in the dried-out muck, how the cabbages was big as a man’s head and the tomatoes twice the size of a fist. Them farmers figured they’d sure enough done the right thing and it was worth getting a little burnt up in winter and regular flooded in the summertime. Then just as quick as all that growth come out the ground, it shriveled up and died. Turned out the drained muck didnt have the minerals necessary to sustain the crops. Couldnt none of them farmers get anybody to take their land off their hands for as low as ten cents on every dollar they’d paid for it. A lot of them said the hell with it and packed up and left it to whoever was fool enough to claim it.

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They’d started clearing the mangroves out of Miami Beach around that time and the rank smell of all that dug-up seabottom was on every ocean breeze carrying into the city. Beginning in 1913 you could drive into the heart of that stink in Miami Beach by way of the Collins Bridge, back then the longest wooden bridge in the world. Most folk today who tell about Old Miami never bother to mention the smell that used to hang over the town. Well, take it for a fact, the stink of Miami was dawn near constant and something to reckon with till you got used to it. But Lord, that crazy place was growing fast! Wasnt ten thousand people there in 1910 and by 1920 it had more than thirty thousand souls. In 1913 a fella named Deering started building himself a humongous old-fashioned Italian-style mansion he called Vizcaya. Build right on the edge of the bay in the Brickell Hammock between Miami and Coconut Grove. Spent millions of it—back when a million dollars was a sum you couldnt imagine. Up till the time Deering build his dream house, the town pretty much depended on a small but regular tourist business in the winter and on Mister Flagler’s railroad. But Deering imported hundreds of European craftsmen to do all the fancy masonry and scrollwork and tile-setting and so forth, and he hired about half the men in town to do everything else. In the two years it took to build the place, Miami grew to almost twice the size it’d been and you couldnt hardly go anyplace in town without hearing all kinds of funny foreigner languages being spoke. In those days Biscayne Bay came right up to the Boulevard and was so clear you could see the stingrays gliding through the grass on the bottom twenty feet down. At the north end of town the bay formed a pretty little cove that tailed in at the Florida East Coast Railroad depot—and down at the south end Flagler’s Royal Palm Hotel was set at the mouth of the Miami River. In between was the rest of the town. The center of business was along Flagler Street between the railroad tracks and the Boulevard. The rowdiest area of all—which included the redlight district—was over along 11th Street and a tad west of Miami Avenue, just outside the city limits. That area was called Hardieville in honor of Sheriff Dan Hardie who’d run the whores out of town. There was a story that Ed Ashley had got in a bad fight in a Hardieville cathouse over some girl the very first time he was in there and thats how he got the scar acrost his mouth that for the rest of his life left him looking like he was about to smile or cry and you never knew which one. The city streets were paved with pulverized limestone back then and the glare of them under the sun would about knock you blind.

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When it rained, the limestone went muddy and got tracked into every house and office. In dry weather the lime dust rose in a thin pale haze and blew in through the windows and doors and got on everything. It wasnt until after the War that the city commission decided to improve on those streets and got the bright idea to pave them over with eightby-four-inch wooden blocks. They were cut from cypress and boiled in creosote and would last till Judgment Day. The workmen laid a layer of white sand over the limestone base and then snugged the blocks in place—and bedamn if the ride over them blocked streets wasnt the smoothest you’d ever know. Then came a frog-strangle of a rainstorm and huge puddles formed in the street and water seeped into the wooden blocks and they started to swell up. Little mounds began forming all over the streets and the rain kept falling and next thing you know—pop! pop! pop!—those blocks started flying up off the streets with a sound like gunshots, just whizzing in every direction and ricocheting off the storefronts and busting windows and scaring the bejesus out of the dogs and the draft animals and anybody standing out there at the time. It kept on like that even after the rain stopped, and halfway into the night you’d still hear an occasional pop out in the street and hear a block crack off a wall or pang against an ashcan. The city commissioners didnt want to give up the smoothness of those wooden-block streets, but they didnt want the blocks flying through the air every time there came a downpour neither. They thunk it over for a while and then decided to put the wooden blocks back in the street, only this time with plenty of play between them to allow for swelling the next time it rained. Everybody thought that was a real smart idea. But now the blocks were so loose they clattered when motorcars and wagons rolled over them. When traffic was heavy the clattering was so loud people on the sidewalks had to shout at each other to make theirselves heard. Even those of us who wasnt but squirts back then can recall the godawful racket of them loose wooden blocks. The first rain to come along after the blocks had been reset swelled them up just enough to fit together real nice and for the next day or two they didnt clatter hardly at all and they gave a real smooth ride and everybody smiled and said the commissioners had done a heck of a smart job of it. A few days later it rained again, only harder, and the blocks swelled up a little snugger against each other. But this time the rain kept falling all through the day and the blocks kept swelling and swelling and suddenly pop! pop! pop! they started shooting out all over the place just like before. One fella was running across the street in the rain to get to the

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barber shop when a block exploded off the street and hit him between the legs and he let out a yelp they probably heard up in Fort Lauderdale. The way the story went, he wasnt much good to his wife in bed after that and she was a high-spirited gal who liked her fun, so she left him a few months later for a Hardieville piano player she’d met in the lobby of a movie house. The abandoned husband was so full of grief he tried to kill himself by jumping in front of a train as it rolled out of the depot but all he managed to do was get both legs cut off a little below the hips. After that he had to push himself along on one of them little platforms on rollers. He begged money on the streets with a tin cup all day and got drunkern hell every night. But he was a mean drunk and one night he got into it with a fella in a Hardieville bar and bit into his shin just as tight as a bulldog and wouldnt let loose for love nor money. The fella was screaming and smacking him with a beer mug and the barkeep came around and started hitting the cripple over the head with a billy like he was driving nails and between them they beat that poor legless fella to death, sure enough. But even then he didnt let go his bite. They finally had to break his teeth with a hammer to get him loose of that shinbone. The cops figured a man being bit had every right to hit whoever was biting him but they knew the bartender for a bully and thought he’d beat on the fella as much for fun as anything else and they charged him with manslaughter. He went to trial and was acquitted real quick because all the jurors were businessmen and understood how it’d be real bad for business if a man let some fella bite on one of his customers without doing something about it. The legless man was buried in a box not four feet long—looked more like a fat child’s coffin than a man’s The whole thing was a terrible true story but a hard one for most folk back then to tell or listen to without grinning by the time they got to the end of it. Oh, that Hardieville was a rough place. Whole damn town was, truth be told. Across the street from the Royal Palm Hotel was a park with a bandshell, and across from the park was the Biscayne Yacht Club, where the rich people kept their boats. The club had a cannon they fired every day at eight in the morning when they raised the Stars and Stripes and again at sunset when the flag came down. They say that many a visitor to the city who didnt know about that cannon and happened to be near the yacht club at eight A.M. or sundown when the fuse was touched off soiled himself. Anybody who ever heard it can tell you how the blasts rattled windows all down the Boulevard and sometimes shook coconuts off the trees.

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Most visitors to Miami were still coming by train or boat but more and more were now driving down on the Dixie Highway which was already a pretty fair whiterock road by then. And starting in 1913 when Dade County went dry—like most Florida counties already were—the Ashleys had good reason to ride that road to Miami fairly often. This was just a few years after that loony bitch Carry Nation showed up in town with her damn hatchet and made a mess of some of the finest polished-mahogany bars in town. They say she could of used her face for a hatchet. Most waterholes had a sign over the backbar saying “Every Nation Welcome But Carry.” Of course, the county law against booze didnt stop Miamians from drinking anymore than a law against breathing would make anybody but a fool go blue in the face. What the law did was help boost Old Joe’s moonshine profits by removing all his legal competition. After John Ashley escaped from Bobby Baker’s custody right there in the yard of the Palm Beach County Jail he became his daddy’s main whiskey runner to Miami. The time was fast approaching when Old Joe would have some mean competition for the whiskey market in Miami—some of the toughest coming from Chicago, if what we heard was right—but for a fact Old Joe was selling more whiskey to the Indians than he ever had, and nobody could cut into his business with them because nobody else knew the Devil’s Garden as well as him and his boys did. No question about it, the Ashleys were making money hand over fist. You’d see Old Joe and his boys driving along the Dixie Highway in Palm Beach County and each one in his own brandnew car. John Ashley had him a spanking new Oakland for a while but we heard he lost it in a poker game in Miami. In Daytona Frank and Ed bought theirselves one of the first Dusenbergs sold in Florida. We heard they took it out on the beach and run it up to over ninety miles an hour but nobody really believed that story. Mind you, this was at a time when forty miles an hour was just flying. People used to say that at ten miles an hour in a Model T the fenders rattled, at twenty the headlamps rattled, at thirty the windshield rattled, and any faster than that your bones rattled. Frank and Ed brung the Dusenberg down to West Palm Beach but the roads around here wasn’t yet ready for any such car and next thing we heard Frank had run it through palmetto pasture and into a live oak and nearly kilt himself. After that the car didnt run no more, so they took the seats out of it and put wire in the windows and used it for a dog pen.

EIGHT August 1914—January 1915

FOLLOWING HIS ESCAPE FROM BOBBY BAKER HE SENT MOST OF HIS days in the Everglades for months thereafter where none of any race or purpose could close on him without warning. He moved from one to another of his father’s whiskey camps and carried skiffloads of Old Joe Ashley’s hooch to Indian villages in the depths of the Devil’s Garden. He hunted and took hides and feathers and his brothers carried them to sell in Stuart or Pompano or on the New River or Miami docks. Every few weeks he drove a load of his daddy’s whiskey down to Miami, going to restaurants and pool halls and hotel kitchens and pleasure houses to make the deliveries and collect the money. Now and then his brothers sojourned to Miami with him to have a high time—always less Bill, whose sense of adventure seemed bounded by account ledgers and whose lust knew no object but his wife. As the town had grown, its pleasures had become plentiful and ever more varied, and the Ashleys found the local attitude toward law enforcement far more amenable than that of Palm Beach County. Both the chief of police and the county sheriff were good old boys largely indifferent to victimless and bloodless violations of the criminal statutes—so long as they received their respectful portion of the profits from all such enterprises. Both men had come to be on first-name acquaintance with the Ashley boys. In Miami the Ashleys would check into a hotel and bathe in porce-

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lain tubs and dress in new suits and sport with the prettiest whores in town and gamble with the sharps and dine on restaurant glassware and sleep on soft beds with fresh linen. These periodic Miami visits both sated their yen for city wickedness and renewed their appreciation of their natural wildland life. They each time asked Old Joe if he would accompany them and he each time fulminated anew against the failings and follies of all cities and loudly lamented the sins of his youth for which God was punishing him by way of sons too ignorant to recognize a city for the shithole it was. Gordon Blue had by now opened an office in the Biscayne Hotel on Flagler Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, routinely thick with motor vehicle traffic and flanked by a multistoried architectural motley of gables and oriels and turrets and verandahs and balconies, lined with arcades and awninged sidewalks heavily overhung with black electric and telephone lines depending from tall cross-beamed poles smelling of creosote. Crooning pigeons nestled on Blue’s windowsills. From those widows he would watch pelicans gliding in V-formations over the bay where tall-masted ships lay at anchor. Seagulls wheeling and shrilling over the city. Turkey buzzards roosting on the roof ledges, nodding their ugly red-naked heads and chuckling as though at dirty jokes, putting him in mind of judges he had known and done business with. Blue had not approved of John Ashley’s escape from Bobby Baker’s custody, not after they had promised Sheriff George Baker that John would not try to get away. “Your promise not to try a break was why he left the cuffs off you when you went to court,” he said to John Ashley. They were in his office and it was the first time they’d seen each other since John’s escape. “They catch you again, Johnny, they’ll lock fifty pounds of chain on you and throw away the key.” John Ashley had to laugh. “They didn’t catch me the first time. I gave myself up, and thats some different. And I did it because they said the trial would be in Palm Beach County. Then those bastards tried to get it moved to Dade. Only a sonofabitch tries to changes a deal after it’s been agreed on, and only a damn fool things he ought keep his word to a sonofabitch. Hell, it aint givin your word that counts, Gordy, it’s who you give it to. If George Baker was fool enough to leave the chains off me while they were tryin to crawfish on our deal, thats his damn fault and nobody else’s.” “The judge hadn’t decided yet that the trial was going to Miami,” Gordon Blue said. He heard the defensiveness in his own voice. “I think I could have kept that from happening.”

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John Ashley narrowed his eyes at Gordon Blue and smiled. Gordon Blue let the matter drop, partly because it would have been fruitless to argue the point—what was done was done and could not be undone—and partly because he believed John Ashley could be right. It was Blue who introduced the Ashley boys to Miami’s backroom gambling spots and hotel poker games frequented by some of the highest rollers in town. Rather than the four of them competing directly against each other, the brothers would split up into paired teams and gamble in different locales—Frank and Ed going to one place, John and Bob playing at another. At the end of the night they would pool whatever winnings they’d pulled in and divide them into equal shares. As far as Gordon Blue knew none of them ever held out on the other, a circumstance that flew in the face of his experience with human nature where money was concerned. At one of these poker sessions in the Biscayne Hotel on a late fall Friday evening Gordon Blue introduced John and Bob Ashley to someone he called the nephew of an old friend, a freckled young man named Kid Lowe, just arrived on the train from Chicago. The fellow seemed to the Ashleys aptly named: in both stature and visage—and in his white boater and red bowtie—he looked about fourteen years old, even though he chainsmoked cigarettes and played a good game of poker. Only his eyes were parcel of a grown man—wary and quick and mistrustful. But as soon as he spoke and they heard his accent they knew him for one of their own. He was not shy in telling of himself and over the course of the next few hours they learned he’d been born in Tallahassee to a footloose mother, herself a native of Tally Town, but he’d been reared from infancy by maiden aunts in Leesburg till he was eighteen. Then he went to Chicago to work for an uncle in the stockyards and eventually became a bodyguard for a man named Silver Jack O’Keefe, whose trade consisted of acquiring high-interest loans from private sources and then lending the money to somebody else at higher interest yet. “Bodyguard?” John Ashley echoed. He gave the diminutive Kid Lowe a pointedly appraising look. Kid Lowe scowled and said, “It aint the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog. I’da figured you all to know that.” Bob Ashley grinned. “That’s sure enough true about dogs, cousin, is sure enough is.” At the game’s conclusion John and Bob Ashley accepted Gordon Blue’s invitation to join him and Kid Lowe at a brightly-lighted cafe on Miami Avenue for pork chop sandwiches and beer. There Gordon

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Blue informed the brothers that Kid Lowe was in difficult circumstances with business associates in Chicago. He did not get specific beyond saying that the matter concerned Silver Jack O’Keefe’s failure to meet a certain financial obligation and that Silver Jack was now said to be at the bottom of Lake Michigan with one end of a rope around his neck and the other tied to a hundred-pound bag of bricks. “What’s that got to do with young Lowe here?” John Ashley said. “I paid a visit to the sumbitch responsible for that sack a bricks,” Kid Lowe said. “I mean, hell, it made me look bad, them snatching him out of the restaurant like they did while I was taking a piss. Made me look like a didnt know how to do my job.” John Ashley nodded and studied the Kid more closely. “That sumbitch in the lake now too?” “Ask me no questions,” Kid Lowe said, “I’ll tell you no lies.” John Ashley laughed and said that was fine by him. Gordon Blue was sure the matter would be cleared up in a week or two, but until then Kid Lowe needed a safe place to lie low. The Ashley boys grinned at the little fugitive and said any friend of Gordon’s was a friend of theirs and they’d be happy to put the boy up for a time, so long as he kept to himself all complaints about mosquitoes or the lack of city amenities he might be used to—such as running water or electricity. Kid Lowe smiled shyly and thanked them and said he’d be proud to get back to country living after three years of the big city life, which he had lately come to lose all fondness for. They returned to the hotel to meet with Ed and Frank Ashley and then at Gordon Blue’s suggestion they all packed into a taxi and headed for the city limits and Hardieville. One side of Frank Ashley’s face was yet puffed and patched with purple from its impact with the windshield when he ran the Dusenberg squarely into an oak. A drizzling rain had fallen through most of the early evening and the limestone streets shone pale under the rattling taxi’s headlamps and in the cast of the infrequent streetlights. A cat’s-eye amber moon rose out of the Atlantic. The air had cooled and the wind was to seaward and carried on it the scent of wet earth and ripe foliage and was free of the usual stink of dredged bay bottom. At this late hour of a Friday night the Hardieville sidewalks were raucous with revelers and with drunks doing the hurricane walk. From its brightly blazing doors and windows came the smells of whiskey and cooking grease, sweat and perfume, the sounds of laughter and shouting and badly sung songs, the plinking of ragtime pianos and the blatting of brass bands. They went into the Purple Duck, a supperplace

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offering three musical floorshows per evening, one of which was in progress before a sparse crowd as they made their way past the dining room—a trio of boaters and peppermint jackets softstepping on a tiny stage and singing “On Moonlight Bay.” A woman in a green satin dress came forth to greet Gordon Blue with a kiss that left its cheerful lipsticked imprint on his cheek. Her smile was warm but her eyes quick and assessing and John Ashley figured her for nobody’s fool. Gordon Blue introduced her as Miss Catherine, the proprietress, and she smiled around at them all and bade them have a swell time. Gordon Blue led the way through a curtained doorway in the rear of the room and down a narrow hall to yet another door. He grinned at his friends and delivered three sharp raps and then two lesser ones. A small peephole opened in the door for a moment and then closed and there was the sound of a latch working and the door opened and a short broad man in a red bowtie and black vest nodded at Gordon Blue and permitted them to pass into a room hazy with dim yellow light and cigarette smoke and loud with ragtime music and laughter and talk. There were crowded tables all about and a small dance floor at one end of the room and beside it a bandstand and on it a Negro pianist playing his rag tunes in a sweat. A brass-railed bar ran the length of the room and the backbar was resplendent with a tiered array of every variety of bottled spirits. Whores everywhere—in shimmies and in filmy Arabian pantalettes and vests and in white cotton bloomers and beribboned lace bodices cut low on their milky breasts—whores plying the tables and bantering with the patrons at the bar and here and there twining arms with a grinning man and the pair making for the stairway leading to the rooms above. They wended their way to the bar and each man called for bourbon. As the bartender set them up John Ashley scanned the crowd and marveled happily at the great allure of vice. He turned to Gordon Blue and said, “I’ve heard tell it aint no fruit so sweet as that which is forbidden, and ever time I come in a place like this I do believe I heard tell correctly.” Gordon Blue grinned and said, “Spoken like a true philosopher, Johnny.” John Ashley smiled. “I do hope and pray the damn Saloon League gets the federals to outlaw spirits. Hellfire, Gordy, we’ll all be rich in no time.” Gordon Blue raised his glass high and said, “To the Saloon League! May its high moral principles enrich us all!” Four hours later they’d each of them made a trip upstairs with a

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girl and Frank and Ed told their brothers they would see them back at the hotel and then departed for The Pair-’O-Dice down the street to see what it was like. John and Bob Ashley, Kid Lowe and Gordon Blue then posted themselves at the bar of The Purple Duck’s backroom and were shortly joined by Miss Catherine who clearly had a special fondness for Gordon Blue. Each man bought a round in his turn and they talked and told jokes and finally agreed to call it a night. The crowd had grown larger now and the air was thick and warm with body heat and gauzed with cigarette smoke and the front door seemed very far away at the other end of the room. Gordon Blue asked Miss Catherine if they might use her special side door and she led them to her office and shut the door behind them and pulled back a heavy set of curtains against the wall to reveal her private door. It opened into a dark alley thick with mud on which a walkway of planks had been laid end to end from Miss Catherine’s door to the street some forty yards distant to their right. Immediately to their left was a cul-de-sac. A light drizzle yet fell in a mist and the alley reeked of rot and human waste and the only light in the alleyway was the dim glow from the streetlamps. While Gordon Blue said his private goodnights to Miss Catherine, John Ashley stepped out onto the plank walkway and the others followed behind. Now Gordon Blue came out and Miss Catherine waved from the brightly lighted doorway and said, “You boys take care now, you hear?” and closed the door behind them. They began to file along the boards, one behind the other, just as a trio of men in derbies came round the corner at the far end of the alley and started toward them on the planks, stark black silhouettes against the yellow backlight of the street, their shadows stretching before them like shades loosed of the graveyard. “This might could get interestin,” Bob Ashley said. Near the midpoint of the walkway, John Ashley and the other point man halted with three feet between them and regarded each other. John Ashley felt himself clearly illumined in the glow of the streetlights, but the other man remained indistinct, a backlighted silhouette. One of the other men raised a bottle to his mouth and it gleamed brightly against the light and John Ashley caught the redolence of rum. “Well now, I guess you lads will be getting a bit of mud on your shoes now, wont ye?” the front man said, and John Ashley felt rather than saw the man’s grin. “We was on this walk before you boys,” John Ashley said. “Anybody gone get their shoes muddy it’s you.”

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“You were on these boards first?” the point man said sardonically. He laughed. “Well, hell I guess that fucken well settles everything, now dont it?” “What the hell you doin arguin with these sonsofbitches?” said one of the other derbied men as he stepped off the plank and came around from behind the point man, his shoes sucking through the mud. The point man grabbed him by the arm and said, “Goddammit, Logan, I know how to deal with these hicks.” Logan shook off the man’s grip and turned to John Ashley and brought a snapblade knife out of his pocket so fast and smoothly it was as if the weapon had been in his hand all along. The small snick of the blade snapping open seemed to John Ashley to make the air go thinner. “Fucken hillbillies,” Logan said and took a step toward John Ashley just as Kid Lowe came slogging up alongside the planks and delivered a grunting kick to the knifer’s balls that raised the man to his toes. John Ashley heard the hiss of Logan’s sharp suck of air and even as the man started to sag Bob Ashley stepped forward and struck him with a huge roundhouse that sent him sprawling back into the mud and Kid Lowe set to kicking the man in the head. The point man caught John Ashley by the throat with both hands and they staggered off the planks and into the mud and John Ashley could not breathe. He grabbed the man’s arms tight at the elbows and planted his feet and swung him around hard into the wall and the man’s breath blew out of him. John Ashley broke free and grabbed him by the neck with one hand and by the hair with the other and rammed the back of the man’s head into the wall a hard half-dozen times and then let him fall to a sitting position and drove his knee into his face and felt the man’s front teeth give way as the man’s head snapped back to strike the wall yet again with a hollow thunk. The man fell over sideways and lay still. Kid Lowe and Bob Ashley were facing off warily against the third man who was armed with the jagged rum bottle he’d broken against the wall. He was feinting first at Bob and then at the Kid, making one and then the other jump back as from a striking snake. Now Kid Lowe said, “Fuck this,” and pressed forward and the man slashed at him several quick times and the Kid fended with his hands but kept advancing and he backed the man against the wall and then charged into him with fists flailing. Bob leaped in and grabbed the man in a headlock and wrestled the bottle from him and drove it into his face and the man screamed. Now the Kid had the man by the hair and was biting

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into his ear and the man screamed again as his ear came away in the Kid’s teeth. Bob and the man fell together in the mud and the kid kicked the man in his gashed face again and again and the man stopped screaming now and Bob was cursing and yelling “You kicking me, goddammit!” and turned loose of the man and rolled away from the Kid’s frenzy. John Ashley was laughing as he grabbed Kid Lowe by the collar and yanked him back and caught him in a bear hug from behind and said, “All right there, killer, all right, I believe you done made your point on the fella.” Kid Lowe’s breath was heaving, his lean muscles twitching under John Ashley’s grasp. Now Gordon Blue came forward from the shadows where he’d sought refuge and said, “Jesus Christ Almighty! Are they dead, any of them?” Bob Ashley made a quick examination of the fallen and verified that all were alive, though none was conscious and the one whose face he and the Kid had mutilated was bleeding badly from a gash in his neck and breathing erratically. “This one aint like to make it,” he said. “Oh Christ,” Gordon Blue said, and took a look around to see if there might be witnesses. “Let’s get the hell out of here—now.” The Kids fury had abated and he said, “You can let go me now.” He put his hands to John Ashley’s arms to free himself of his embrace and John Ashley felt their touch slicked with blood. “Damn, Kid, let’s see them hands.” He pulled the Kid over closer to the street where the light was better. “I need some kinda bandage here,” he said. Bob Ashley stripped the shirt off the Logan fellow and tore it in two and John Ashley held the Kid’s dripping hands out while Bob bandaged them tightly each in turn. He told the Kid the niggerwrap job would have to do till they got him home and Ma could tend to his wounds proper. Both brothers were grinning as Bob finished tying off the bandages and remarked how damned glad he was that Kid Lowe was on their side because he sure didnt fancy fighting somebody who was half-crazy and half-cannibal besides. Kid Lowe was grinning with them now and saying the ear didn’t taste half bad and maybe he ought to have cut the other one off him to have for breakfast in the morning. They all three laughed. And now Gordon Blue was tugging at John Ashley’s arm with one hand and at Bob Ashley’s with the other and saying, “Let’s go, let’s go!” and the look on his face made them all three laugh the harder. And then they cleared out of there fast.

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Two days later Kid Lowe was living in a small pinewood cabin behind the outside kitchen of the Ashley home. And three weeks after that, Ma Ashley’s good stitches now removed from his hands and his hands almost completely unstiffened, he went with John and Bob Ashley on his first alligator hunt. Although cracker by blood, he’d been raised fatherless and brotherless, without masculine mentor of any sort, and thus had not been taught the usual wildland skills most crackers early acquired. He owned all the natural inclinations, however, and took to poling an Everglades skiff as one long practiced at it. At supper that night the Ashleys listened in high amusement to him tell all about how well he’d learned from John Ashley to bark like a dog to call alligators into open water for easier killing. He could not stop talking of the three gators he’d killed and the two he had skinned mostly by himself after the brothers taught him how to take the hide off the first one. None of the Ashleys minded listening to Kid Lowe’s story three times over as they sipped at cups of old Joe’s best. They knew the little cracker from the city was but happy to be among his own kind. The next time they saw Gordon Blue he told them there had been but one recent mention in the Miami newspapers of a dead man found in an alley but the alley in question was not the one where they had fought the three men. “If that fella in the alley didnt, ah, make it,” Gordon Blue said, “his friends must’ve taken him away from there.” John Ashley still slipped into West Palm Beach every now and then to visit Miss Lillian’s and be with blind Loretta May. They were easy with each other now as they were with no one else, and had for a while even played a game whereby they would make bets as to what part of her he was looking at while they caressed each other’s nakedness. At first they bet a dollar each time but after she lost the first five times she suggested they raise the bet to five dollars, saying maybe she could do better if there was more at stake. He said all right, but he hated taking advantage. She said he shouldn’t feel guilty about it because after all it was her who wanted to raise the ante. She won the next five times in a row before he realized she’d conned him thoroughly, that she knew exactly where his eyes were on her at all times, and how she knew this did not trouble him as much as the fact that she used the knowledge to hornswoggle him. One more time, he said. On the next bet she said that he was looking at her left breast, which he was, but he told her she was wrong, he was looking at her belly, and she laughed with such delight that he knew she knew he was lying

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and he had to laugh too. He tried to summon a proper degree of indignation. “I dont know how you know what I’m lookin at, but knowin it and pretendin you dont know just cause you’re blind, thats the same as cheatin.” At which she could only laugh. “And it aint cheatin to make bets with a blind person about what you lookin at?” After their lovemaking one night she asked if he had many dreams. Did she mean dreams like things he wanted to do real bad before he died, he asked, or dreams like things you see in your sleep at night. “Night dreams,” she said. He said it was funny she should ask that because, truth be told, he knew he’d been dreaming a lot lately but he could never remember the dreams when he woke up. “Funny thing is,” he said, “while I’m havin the dreams it’s like I know they’re showin me things that’re real, or…true somehow. I mean, when I wake up thats the feelin I have, that I just dreamt about somethin true, only I cant remember what it was.” “You will,” she said. “The time’ll come you will.” He looked at her for a long moment, unsure whether to ask her what she meant. And now, as he stared at her smiling face, she said, “You’re looking at my mouth—thats another five dollars you owe me.” He gave a mock roar and fell on her, saying, “You bat-blind little witch!” And laughing, wrestling happily, they made love once again. Gordon Blue’s estimation of how long it would take to resolve Kid Lowe’s Chicago troubles proved overly optimistic and two months later the Kid was still residing with the Ashleys, though he didn’t at all mind and neither did the family. He was proud that the largest of the three turkeys Ma and the girls roasted for Christmas dinner was one he’d shot. In addition to taking him hunting and trapping with his brothers, John Ashley now allowed him to come with him on whiskey drops to the Indians and Kid Lowe marveled at the alien wonders of these primitive villages in the heart of the Devil’s Garden. The Kid liked Twin Oaks but he loved the whiskey camps. He loved their wildness. He loved the stygian nights when the orange pinefires under the great copper kettles were the only light save that of the moon and stars to hold at bay an encompassing darkness greater than imagination could conjure. The fires raised trembling shadows against the closely standing hardwoods hung with moss and twisted vines that held to the earth like umbilicals. The blackness beyond the fireglow stirred and rustled and splashed and sometimes sounded of

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fluttering wing. From the greater darkness came deep quivering grunts of alligators whose forebears had themselves looked upon dinosaurs. Came skin-tightening shrieks of panthers at mate, sporadic outcries of prey falling to predator. The night swamp was ever clamorous with blood. The air pungent with the redolence of muck and water seasoned richly with matter living and dead. On nights as these they sat about the kettle fire into the late hours and smoked pipe and cigarette and sipped whiskey and told stories both real and invented to entertain each other. They never tired of hearing of the night John Ashley took a drive to Twin Oaks after several weeks of hiding out at whiskey camp and Ma Ashley stepped out on the porch and fired a doubleblast of her shotgun in the air to warn him of the policemen lurking in the surrounding brush. “Old Johnny just hustled on up to the turnaround and stomped on the brake and kicked her into reverse and turned that Lizzie around on a damn silver dollar and right back out we went,” Ed Ashley said, who had been in the car with John that night. “Cut off the headlamps so they couldnt see us but then naturally we couldnt see a damn thing neither. Lord knows how many times we run into the palmettos on either side of that little-bitty trail getting back to the main road in the dark. We was bouncing all over hell and I about got throwed right out the damn car more’n once, I mean to tell you.” It was early in the new year and their breath showed vaguely gray on the dark chill air. They were at the whiskey camp in the Hungryland Slough and about fifteen miles west of Juno Beach—John and Ed Ashley, Kid Lowe and Claude Calder, a rough and rangy bucktoothed youth, a longtime friend of the Ashleys and Old Joe Ashley’s main deliveryman to most clients north of Fort Pierce. On this night Bob and Frank Ashley were helping their father out at the Sand Cut camp on Lake Okeechobee. John Ashley spat into the fire and laughed with the others at the memory of that wild night ride. “Bet when Ma let go with that shotgun,” he said, “then police in the bushes pissed their pants.” “They say Sheriff George about had a fit when he heard about it,” Claude Calder said. “He surely did,” Ed Ashley said. “Came out to the house next day and told Ma she could get in trouble for aidin and abettin a fugitive from the law. Ma just looked at him like he was simple and said she didnt know nothin about no abettin nor any such gamblin talk, she’d just been shooting at some old hooty owl been tryin to get at a new litter of pups under the front porch.”

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“Them damn Bakers,” Claude said. “You all heard Sheriff George done made Bobby his chief deputy?” “I know it,” Ed Ashley said. “That sumbuck Bobby’s gonna be the sheriff before you know it, just watch and see.” Even in the vague and shifting light of the fire, the cordlike scar across his mouth was visible and made him look about to laugh or about to cry, you couldnt be sure which. An Okeechobee catfisher had cut him with a filleting knife in a fight over a Hardieville whore named Della. Ed Ashley had then beaten the man senseless with a spitoon and had just snatched up the man’s dropped knife and was set to shove it into his heart when he was pried away by the bouncer and a sheriff’s deputy. He spent the night in jail and his father bailed him out the next day. He waited a couple of weeks until his wound was partially healed before he went back to Miami to see Della again but by then she had departed for places unknown. Another of the girls tried to console him by pointing out that he likely wouldnt have won her over anyway, not now, not with that awful scar, since Della always had been one to prize handsomeness. Ed Ashley had not spoken of her since, not even to Frank, but not a day passed that he did not think of her. “Maybe Bobby’ll become sheriff before Sheriff George knows it,” Claude Calder said, and everybody laughed. “I seen him up to Stuart just the other day,” Ed Ashley said as he worked open a fresh jar of whiskey. He took a tentative taste and worked his tongue around it and considered and then nodded his approval. “You know, I do believe daddy’s still gettin some better at his business, I truly do.” “You seen who? Bobby?” John Ashley said. “What was he up to? Still running his mouth about what a sumbitch I am to of run off and what a good man he is for not shooting me?” “Like usual, yeah,” Ed said. “Told me to tell you again, when you ready to meet him face-to-face just the two of you, you let him know.” “Face-to-face, my ass,” John Ashley said. He spat. “You know as well as I do, he’ll say he’s gonna meet me just us two and then have a dozen damn deputies hid all around to jump me soon’s I show up. Man’s a born liar. If he said the ocean’s made of salt water I’d expect it to taste like sugar. I tell you, I’m of a mind to slip up to his house one a these nights and call him out, just us two, and see what happens.” “I told him I’d take him on anytime,” Ed said, “but he gimme a shiteatin grin and said it’s been between him and you. Before I could say another word he went on in the bank to add to his pile of money.”

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“I bet it is a pile, too,” Claude Calder said. “Only I hear it’s Sheriff George raking in the money, not Bobby. They say Bobby just runs it to the bank for him. But I bet anything he gets a cut.” “It’s always been talk Sheriff George takes money, but I never heard anybody but a known liar say Bobby does,” John Ashley said. “But he’ll for damn sure do whatever his daddy tells him, and if Daddy says pick up money from someplace or take money to the bank, thats what he’s gonna do.” “I heard from Miss Lillian that Sheriff George takes a cut from every gambling joint and whorehouse in the county—nigger and white both,” Ed Ashley said. “She said he’d jacked up his cut to twenty percent and she cant hardly make a profit anymore unless she raises her own prices. Said she called him a thief and he laughed at her and said it aint thievin to steal from criminals.” “He got some interestin notions of justice, Sheriff George,” John Ashley said. Nobody spoke for a moment and then he said, “They really keep their money in the Stuart bank? Maybe Bobby was just seeing to some kind of police business.” “Hell, John,” Ed said, “he had a damn bag right there in his hand and if it wasn’t fulla money I’ll kiss your ass.” “How you know it was money in it?” “Cause I seen him take it to the teller and hand it over to him and stand there while the fella went off with it to someplace in back and in a minute the fella comes back and hands him a piece of paper and Bobby sticks it in his shirt, thats how come I know it. I was waitin for him to come out. I said, ‘Let’s you and me step around back in alley and you take off that badge and we’ll see whose ass is the blackest.’ He just give that smile some more and said to tell you he’s waitin on you, and off he went, the chickenshit son of a bitch.” For a minute none of them said anything, each man drifting on his own thoughts. Then Kid Lowe said: “You know, somebody ought rob that bank and all them Bakers’ money in it.” Ed Ashley grinned his wretched grin and glanced at John, who smiled and cut his gaze to the fire. Bob had told the other Ashley brothers about John’s Galveston bank job and John had then sworn them all to keep it secret from their father. Still, all of the brothers had a feeling their father somehow knew about it. “Hell, boy,” Ed said, turning back to the Kid, “what-all you know about robbin a damn bank?” Kid Lowe turned to him with a glower, then looked around at the others, then behind him, then spat into the fire. “I guess it’s all right

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to tell you boys something.” He looked around again as if checking the surrounding shadows for signs of spies. “The thing is,” he said in lowered voice, “I’m a bank robber is what I am.” He smiled with shy pride. “Dont guess any you all’s gonna turn me in, are you?” The others exchanged looks. Claude Calder chuckled. Ed Ashley snorted and said, “Shiiit! You never.” “Hell I aint,” the Kid said. “It’s how come I’m here. I robbed four banks all told in Chicago and was doing all right, if I say so myself, till I robbed this one bank on State Street. There was a dumbshit guard just couldnt do like I told him to put his hands behind his head and so he got himself shot.” He paused to spit and take a sip of whiskey. “You shot a bank guard?” Ed Ashley said. “You kill him?” “Oh hell no,” the Kid said. “Wasnt aimin to. All I did was wound him in the gut a little bit. He didnt die till long after, about two weeks later. Caught the pneumonia in the hospital and died.” “Well hell,” John Ashley said, “he caught the pneumonia because he was bad wounded, thats what happened.” Kid Lowe flung his arms wide in exasperation. “That’s just exactly what the damn cops in Chicago told everybody including the newspapers.” The bitter memory gave his voice an edge. “Sorry sonofabitches. How do they know the fella didnt catch pneumonia for some other reason? How do you know he didnt? Maybe somebody with pneumonia sneezed on him. Maybe he wasnt warm enough in that damn hospital and he caught a cold and it got worser till it became pneumonia. That could of happened. They dont know thats not what happened. But noooo, they right away say he got pneumonia because he was wounded. And because I’m the one wounded him I’m the one to blame he’s dead. Makes me so goddamn mad I wish the sumbitch was alive so I could shoot him again.” “So you down here hiding from the Chicago police?” Ed Ashley said. Kid Lowe shrugged, spat, took another sip of whiskey, looked around at nothing in particular. “How much did you get from these here bank robberies?” Claude Calder said. “You must got yourself a rich stash someplace, eh?” “Dont I wish,” Kid Lowe said. “Most the jobs didnt get me even two thousand dollars. And the way I was living—you know, girls, the racehorses, nice clothes—well, the money went pretty damn quick, you bet.” He took a drink of whiskey and looked sharply at Ed Ashley. “So dont be asking me what I know about robbing banks. I’m the only

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damn one here knows anything about it because I’m the only damn one here ever done it.” Ed Ashley met his stare for a moment, then turned to John and raised his eyebrows. John was grinning at the Kid and the Kid looked at him sharply and John Ashley said, “Well boy, that aint exactly right.” They hadn’t been at all sure what Old Joe would think of the idea. While John Ashley explained it to him a few evenings later, all of them sitting around the firepit back of the Twin Oaks house, Old Joe gave no sign of his inclination as he listened without expression, puffing his pipe and sipping his whiskey and occasionally spitting into the fire. And when John had explained everything in detail and sat back to hear what his father thought of it, he who might dismiss the whole thing with a shake of his head, Old Joe did not answer right away but refired his pipe and refilled his cup and sat smoking and drinking and staring into the fire. Nobody spoke for five minutes. And then, his eyes still on the flames, Joe Ashley said: “I don’t understand it. All this trouble because of some worthless Injun. That goddamn George Baker’s been a real mullethead recent and thats a fact. I hear tell he’s drinkin moren usual. He looks it. Startin to get that yellow look around the eyes. But whatever’s botherin him aint no good excuse for takin hisself so damn serious as he’s been. I heard tell he said if he ran you down he’d take you in any way he had to. Heard tell those were his exact words: any way he had to. When I saw him up to Blue’s store last month I went over and asked was it true he said that. He said it was. I said the day he did serious harm to any of you boys was the day I’d lay him in his grave. He knew I meant it. Bobby was there and started to run his mouth at me but George told him shut up.” He looked skyward and regarded the stars. “You know Freddie Baker, Bobby’s cousin? He’s a deputy too.” John Ashley nodded. “More like brothers than cousins, some say. Spose to be a good old boy and a rough one, but he aint never looked all that rough to me.” “I heard tell,” Old Joe said, “Freddie was in the Doghouse Bar the other night saying his Uncle George is gonna run the Ashleys out of Palm Beach County or know the reason why. Saying it like it’s somethin good as done.” “I heard that talk,” John Ashley said. “We all have. We waitin to see them try.”

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“Them damn Bakers are kindly startin to irritate me,” Old Joe said. He spat hard into the fire. They all sat silent and the minutes passed. Then Old Joe said: “You sure they keep they money in that bank?” “Yessir.” Joe Ashley sighed and stared into the fire. “Cant imagine why anybody’d trust his money to a damn bank.” John Ashley laughed. “Me either. Somebody’s like to steal it.” Old Joe nodded in the manner of one being told something he already knew. “Bill says the fedral govment’s sooner or later gonna pass the law against alcohol,” he said. “Probly not for a coupla three four years yet, he dont think, but he says a smart man would start getting ready right now. Says the demand’s gonna be way more than we can ever fill with just our own operation. Says if we get us a good fast boat and rig it proper we can bring in ever kind of labeled hooch when the time comes. Bring it from the Bahamas. Course now, a good boat costs plenty, and riggin it up for our purpose gonna cost more.” He paused and spat. Then said: “I guess what I wanna know is, is it a lot of money in that bank?” John Ashley shrugged. “Dont know, Daddy.” He smiled. “But if it aint, there’s plenty more banks.” Old Joe returned his smile for a moment, then his aspect went serious. “They already got so many warrants on you I guess it dont matter much if they add any more, even for a damn bank. But I dont want you takin no chances you aint got to. You see any police around before you go in, you forget the job. Wait and do it another time. You hear?” “I hear you, Daddy.” His heart jumped with excitement. Old Joe turned to Frank and Ed and Bob. “But you boys, you aint none of you under warrant for a damn thing and I dont want you to be.” Bob Ashley cut his eyes to John whose look told him to keep quiet. Frank and Ed dug at the dirt with sticks, ready as always to do without objection whatever their daddy said. “Damn Bakers,” Old Joe said and spat hard into the fire. “They kindly irritatin hell outa me.”

NINE February 23, 1915

THEY GOT OUT OF THE CAR AT THE BEND IN THE HIGHWAY AND then Frank and Ed Ashley drove off to wait for them at the junction of the Lake Okeechobee Road. The four then walked the last quarter-mile into town on this midmorning of a brightly blue-skyed and cloudless Tuesday. The pinewoods fell away at the edge of town and they walked down the main street and nodded to storekeepers at their doors and tipped their hats to women on the sidewalk and paused to scratch the ears of friendly dogs. They waved casually to acquaintances driving past. All the while looking about for police cars or cops afoot and seeing neither. There were three customers in the bank lobby and two tellers at work behind the cage and the manager sat at his desk behind a waist-high partition at the far end of the room. A pair of overhead fans hung motionless in the near-cool of this winter’s day. None looked up nor noticed the four men until Bob Ashley shut the door hard enough to rattle the glass. Kid Lowe went to the windows and drew the curtains. Bob turned the little cardboard sign hanging on the glass front door so that the “Closed” side faced outward and then he pulled down the rollered shade and stood with his back to it. His grin was titanic. John Ashley withdrew a .44 caliber revolver from under his loose shirt and grinned at the uncomprehending faces turned his way and announced, “Gentlemen, this is a robbery. Do like we say and nobody gets hurt. Why hell, you all gonna have an adventure to tell all your

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friends.” His heart was at a gallop and he felt like laughing and thought maybe he was going crazy but so what. Claude Calder went to stand by the far wall with a pistol in his hand and his grin mirrored John Ashley’s. “All right now. folk,” John Ashley said, gesturing at the customers, “sit on the floor. Sit on your hands.” There was no guard. The Stuart bank had been in business for years and never before been robbed. In this region, all notion of bank holdups was yet the stuff of Wild West stories, of Jesse James and his ilk, not any part of real life. Kid Lowe moved to the other end of the room and vaulted the low partition and put his pistol to the bank manager’s ear and told him to put his hands under his ass. The manager’s name was Ellers. He appeared mildly dazed and his mouth moved as though speech were but an untried concept. Kid Lowe smiled and said, “Just stay hushed, mister. We’ll tell you when to talk.” He picked up the telephone on the desk. “This the only one?” The manager nodded. Kid Lowe yanked the line out of its connection and lobbed the instrument clattering into the corner. The two tellers were Wallace and Taylor and both of them knew the Ashley boys and Claude Calder. Wallace said, “John…you boys…why are you all doing this?” John Ashley laughed. “Well, shit, A.R., why you think? Open up the gate.” Wallace hastened to unlock the wire gate to the teller cage and John Ashley entered and handed him a croker sack and said, “Hold this open wide for Mister Taylor. Mister Taylor sir, you just empty all them little money drawers in the bag, hear? Do it now, sir, and do it quickly.” “Sorry, mam,” Bob Ashley said loudly through the glass of the closed front door, holding aside slightly the roller shade and speaking to a woman insistently rapping on the doorglass with the handle of her parasol. “We’re closed up a few minutes. Doin a inventory. Be open again shortly.” The woman scowled and again rapped on the glass. Bob Ashley smoothed the roller shade back in place and turned his back on the door and shrugged at Claude Calder. As Wallace and Taylor emptied the cash drawers John Ashley went into the bank’s small vault and searched it and discovered but a halfdozen packets of twenty-dollars bills. He came out and dropped the packets in the croker sack. Taylor was redfaced and whitehaired, bigbellied, breathing like a man at hard labor. John Ashley patted him

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on the shoulder and told him to take it easy, everything was going to be fine. “Tell me somethin, A.R.,” John Ashley said, “is it true George and Bobby Baker keep their money in this bank?” A. R. Wallace looked at him for a moment as though he didnt understand the question. Then said: “Well, they do keep an account here, but I believe their main bank is in West Palm Beach.” John Ashley smiled and said, “Just so they got some here.” The woman at the door was rapping harder now, her angry voice carrying through the doorglass: “…open this door, you…” The silhouette of a man in a suit and hat appeared beside her, the man trying to peek in through the slight gap between the roller shade and the frame of the door. Bob Ashley sidestepped over so as to block the man’s view with his back. Now Wallace handed the sack to John Ashley who hefted it as though trying to determine the sum of its contents by its weight. “How much you figure?” he asked. “It’s about seven thousand dollars you all got there,” Wallace said. “Seven thousand!” Kid Lowe said. “I know it’s a lot more money than that in this place.” “There isn’t any more,” Ellers the manager was able to say. “This is a small bank. We never have much cash on hand.” Kid Lowe put the muzzle of his .38 just under Ellers’ right eye and the man’s voice went high: “I swear to you it’s all there is!” Kid Lowe said, “You banker sonofabitches dont do nothing but lie about money.” “I swear…” Ellers said, his eyes shut tight but his head full of the terrible visions Kid Lowe’s pistol pressed into it. “Leave him be,” John Ashley said. “He’s too scared to be lyin. I checked the vault myself. It’s no more money in there.” “You lucky I aint in charge of this operation,” Kid Lowe said to Ellers and jabbed him hard in the forehead with the gun muzzle and raised a red spot there. “You be a dead man already for bein such a damn liar.” John Ashley ordered all the people on the floor to lie down on their bellies with their faces in their hands. “You too, Mister Ellers, get on down there. Mister Taylor, sir. You, A.R., I know you got a motorcar. Where’s it at?” “Around back.” John Ashley nodded at Claude Calder who went out the rear door

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of the bank. Two minutes later Bob Ashley peering out the front window said, “Here’s Claude with the car.” Another man had now arrived at the door and both men and the woman were trying to peek past Bob and into the bank lobby and the woman all the while tapping on the glass with the whalebone grip of her parasol. “God damn that racket,” John Ashley said. “Get them sumbitches in here, Bob.” Bob Ashley unlocked the door and swung it open and said, “All right, then, come on in.” But the three now saw the others on the floor and their faces went slack and they stood fast. One of the men started to turn away and nearly walked into Claude Calder who had come out of the Ford touring car idling in the street and stood before him, grinning wide and with a hand on the pistol butt jutting above his waistband. A pair of boys went running past, dodging the two men as unerringly as bats. Their mother came stalking behind, calling, “Albert! Samuel! You two are just askin for it!” Claude Calder nodded toward the door and the two men and the woman went into the bank. The woman was middle-aged but not unattractive and Bob puckered his lips at her. She blushed and jerked her gaze away from him and he laughed. John Ashley told them to lie down in the same manner as the others. He asked Bob how things looked outside. “Aint nobody noticin nothin,” Bob Ashley said, looking out to the street. “I dont believe most people would take notice of a flyin elephant lessen it shit on their heads.” “All right, then, let’s go,” John Ashley said. He tucked the sack of money under his arm like a tote of groceries. “Listen, you folk—there’s a fella with a rifle watching this door from the roof across the street. Anybody goes out that door before fifteen minutes gone by, you gone get a bullet in the brainpan and thats a promise. So you all wait, you hear? Fifteen minutes. And listen A.R., we’ll leave your car out by the Okeechobee Road, you hear?” Wallace said he much appreciated it, his voice muffled for his face being in his hands. They went out all together and Claude Calder got behind the wheel of the Ford and the Kid got in the front passenger seat with him. Bob and John Ashley got in the back and pulled the cartop up and Claude and the Kid fastened it in place on the windshield frame. Then Claude released the brake and pulled on the throttle lever as he stepped on the low-speed pedal and the car lunged into motion. They were all of

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them but the Kid grinning and Bob Ashley’s grin was the widest of them. “This how it felt in Texas, Johnny?” he wanted to know. “Good as this?” John Ashley laughed. “About like this, yeah.” Claude Calder eased up on the throttle and worked the clutch pedal and the planetary transmission shifted with a lurch and the car rattled down the street. Kid Lowe turned around in his seat and said, “I dont know what-all you think’s so damn funny. We didnt get but seven thousand dollars and I know there was more money in that bank—I know there was.” “I’ll be go to hell,” Bob Ashley said, suffused with good cheer. “Aint this the same little fella told us he never made more’n two thousand dollars from any of his big-time Chicago bank holdups—and here we get seven thousand and he’s complaining it aint enough.” “Two thousand I get by myself is two thousand all for me,” Kid Lowe said. “Seven thousand I get with six other fellas aint but…I dont know what it is, but it aint no two thousand.” They were almost to the end of town now and Claude Calder said, “Oh hell.” All eyes in the car followed his gaze ahead to the left side of the street and saw parked there in front of Wilson’s Cafe a county sheriff’s car and a Stuart Police Dept. car and standing in the doorway of the cafe was Bob Baker. He was not in uniform and was saying something to someone inside and laughing and turning now and stepping out on the sidewalk and putting a toothpick to his mouth. As their car came abreast of him two uniformed sheriff’s deputies and two Stuart policemen came out behind him. Bob baker looked at their passing car and then at its occupants and his smile held for a moment longer and his eyes followed after them. They all looked back at him and Bob Baker’s smile vanished. “Kick this thing in the ass, Claude,” John Ashley said. And here came one of the bank customers on the run and behind him came Ellers as Claude’s fingers busied themselves with the spark and gas levers and his foot worked the control pedal to drop the car into low gear and wind the engine higher and then he worked the pedal again and the motor issued a deep fluffing note and the car lunged forward and accelerated steadily. Even over the increased clatter of the Model T they could faintly hear the bankers shouting holdup, holdup, holdup. Women pulled small children to their skirts and hurried indoors as men came hustling out of the cafe and the barbershop and the hardware store. Bobby Baker ran out to the middle of the street and raised his

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revolver and the other cops were pulling their weapons and now came the popping of pistols and bullets thonked into the back of the car and two rounds whooked through the car top and made starholes as they smashed through the windshield. Bob Ashley leaned out the right side of the car and fired back at the cops and they scattered in search of cover—all but Bobby Baker who stood his ground and aimed and fired as if he were taking target practice. Kid Lowe leaned over the front seat and fired at Bobby Baker in the receding distance through the cartop’s open rear window and John Ashley was firing as well but the car was jouncing so much he could not have said where his bullets homed. Kid Lowe’s pistol was inches from his ear and its reports deafened him to all else in the world. Claude Calder hunkered over the steering wheel as if peering into bad fog, one hand on the wheel and the other still at the spark and gas levers. The Model T was now moving at thirty-five miles per hour and still gaining speed even as it shuddered so hard John Ashley was certain it was about to shake itself to pieces. A bullet ripped through the back of the cartop and flicked away a portion of Claude Calder’s right ear lobe and fashioned another starburst in the glass before him. The pinewoods again loomed high on both sides of the road as the Model T sped into the curve and out of sight of the shooting policemen. The car leaned hard to the left and raised a tall roostertail of lime dust as it swung out wide to the edge of the highway at the top of a grassy incline and its right wheels almost left the ground as Claude Calder fought to keep it on the road. Just as the curve began to straighten out and the car leaned back toward a level pitch its left front wheel dipped into a hole in the shoulder and the car bounced high and yawed sidewise with the wheel fluttering wildly and everyone rose and fell and Kid Lowe’s head bounced against the cartop and his pistol discharged and the bullet angled into John Ashley’s head at the juncture of his left eye socket and the nosebone and passed through the hard palate and struck his lower right jaw and instantly filled his mouth with blood and bits of teeth and bone. The car plunged down the roadside slope into the brush and went snapping through a half-dozen saplings before crashing into a thick pine—and all in the same moment Claude Calder’s forehead shattered the windscreen and the right front door slung open and Kid Lowe catapulted from it and just did miss hitting a tree and lit in a clump of palmettos and Bob Ashley lofted over the front seat and struck against the dashboard and felt one of his ribs stave and John Ashley

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slammed against the back of the front seat and crumpled to the floorboard. He was yet conscious but his head felt strangely stuffed, his skull somehow askew. Blood overran his mouth and rained to the floor-board. He felt the vaguest pain. There was a loud hissing from the front of the car and now he remembered where he was and why. Claude Calder groaned. Bob Ashley grunting and cursing now and getting out of the car. Kid Lowe’s voice at the car door, saying, “You hit?” Bob Ashley saying, “I’m all right. Claude? Claude, you?” Claude saying he didnt think he was hit. Bob Ashley saying for Claude to get up on the road and see was anybody coming after them. Now the rightside rear door sprang open and Bob said, “Oh shit. Help me with him.” Hands at his armpits. Lifting him, pulling him out of the car, turning him over and easing him to the ground on his back and he choked on the blood of his wound and turned his head to let the blood gush onto the grass. Then Bob was dragging him by the armpits to a pine tree a few yards away, helping him to sit up with his back against the trunk. Blood running off his chin and sopping the front of his shirt. His left eye throbbing now, its vision redly hazed but functioning. Bib looking close at it—then touching his jaw and pain bursting incandescent in his skull and he flinched from Bob’s hand. Bob asked if he was hit anywhere else and he was able to say quite clearly, “No.” “July missed that eye,” Bob said. “Dont know if you been hit twice or one bullet went through your whole entire head to end up in your mouth like that.” He smiled weakly. “Lucky for you it was in the head, hey? Not much to hit in there.” And then: “That goddamn Bobby Baker!” “Wasnt Bobby’s doin,” Kid Lowe said. He stood over them and told what happened. “Well, God damn it,” Bob Ashley said, glaring up at him. Kid Lowe looked off to the woods. “Aint his fault,” John Ashley said. His voice deeply nasal, his tongue clumsy and feeling like an alien appendage. He marveled that he could talk at all, never mind with clarity. And now here came Claude Calder on the run and shouting, “They’re coming! Both damn cars!” “Let’s get our ass in the swamp the other side of his pineywood,” Bob Ashley said. He tried to help his brother to his feet but John Ashley felt the ground undulate and he almost passed out from the

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effort of trying to stand. He slumped back against the pine trunk and waved his brother away. “Go! Go on!” he said, his voice gargled with blood. “I be arright, Go!” “I aint leaving you!” Bob Ashley said. They could hear the police cars closing in. “GO!” John Ashley said. “Won’t help nothin they catch you too. GO!” “Come on, Bob,” Kid Lowe called from the edge of the pines. He held the croker sack of money. “Cant help him if you aint free. Come on!” And now Claude Calder was beside the Kid and the two of them turned and vanished into the trees. “Go on, bubba—Goddamn it, GO!” John Ashley said, pushing at his brother. The police cars came shrilling around the curve into view and Bob Ashley said, “Shit!” and bolted for the trees. The cop cars braked hard to a halt, raising a cloud of limerock dust. The driver’s door of the sheriff’s car swung open and the driver came out with a pistol in hand and from around the other side of the car came the other deputy and Bob Baker and both of them with shotguns. Now the Stuart policemen got out of their car too and stood beside the county officers and all of them looked down the grassy incline at the figure of John Ashley watching them from where he sat under the pine. John Ashley raised his hands slightly to show them he was not armed. He was sure they were going to shoot him anyway. He was conscious of the feel of the ground under him, the swell and fall of his chest with each breath, his heartbeat pulsing steadily against his ribs. He brushed the blood from his eye. Bob Baker said something to the others and they started down the grade, spreading out and moving slowly. All of them keeping their weapons trained on the wrecked Model T but for Bob Baker who held his twelve-gauge pointed at John Ashley’s chest. “Anybody in that car?” Bob Baker said as he drew near. John Ashley shook his head and pain streaked through his skull like a cat afire. Bob Baker gave a hand signal and the others began shooting the Model T. They stormed it with buckshot and .38- and .45-caliber rounds and they emptied their weapons into it and reloaded and continued shooting and shooting and the car seemed to flinch and sag under the fusillade and its glass flung in shards and John Ashley who sat but a few feet from the vehicle covered his head with his arms and reflected that A.R. was going to be mighty dismayed when next he saw his car. The cops fired on the Model T for a full minute before

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they finally stopped. John Ashley lowered his arms and saw that he’d been cut on a elbow and felt now a stinging on his neck and put his hand to it and his palm came away bloodstained. The car listed like a ship afounder. Its tires were shot to ruin, its bodyshell pocked like something diseased, its glasswork reduced to sparse jagged remnant, its top in tatters. The two Stuart cops advanced cautiously through a thin haze of gunsmoke with their revolvers raised. They carefully peered into the car and now one of them jerked open each door in turn and then the cops lowered their pistols and one called to Bob Baker that the car was empty. Bob Baker went to John Ashley and squatted down beside him and leaned on his shotgun like a staff. He pushed back his straw hat and mopped the sweat from his face with a bandanna and smiled at John Ashley. John Ashley smiled back and his whole face felt numbly weighted and overwide. One of the county deputies started to come their way but Bob Baker waved him off and the deputy shrugged and looked about and then headed into the woods. Bob Baker smiled. “Guess you right there’s nobody in the car,” he said. His gaze moved over John Ashley’s bloody and distorted face. “How you been keepin?” “Doin all right, Bobby,” John Ashley said. “How bout youself?” “Lot bettern you, by the look of things.” He leaned forward for a close examination of the wounds and John Ashley felt his breath warm on his face. “Pretty good shootin, hey?” “Wasnt your bullet done it.” “Hell it wasnt,” Bob Baker said. “Your face in the back window like that, I couldnt hardly miss. Had you square in my sights. But it wasnt really good shootin. I was tryin to blow your brains out.” The yellow teeth of his closeup grin were huge. “I seen that Calder boy doin the drivin. And your brother Bob, seen him too. Who’s the other one? The little fella?” John Ashley shrugged. “Whoo! Would you just look at this eye! How you seein out that eye, Johnny?” “Still seein all right with it, Bobby, thank you.” “Well, I seen some bloodshot peepers before but nothin like this. Dont believe I ever seen a eye lookin so bad and still workin.” He put his fingers to the shattered and swollen jaw and John Ashley winced and sucked air through his teeth and Bob Baker said, “I bet that does smart.” He looked around and John Ashley followed his eyes and saw that none of the other policemen were about.

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New Bob Baker leaned closer still and gently laid a hand on the left side of John Ashley’s face. “Who’d you say that other fella was?” “Billy the Kid.” “Oh yeah,” Bob Baker said. “I heard of him.” He slid his thumb up to the corner of the bloody eye and John Ashley locked his jaws against the pain and the surge of bile in his throat. Bob Baker’s teeth loomed large. Came a whisper: “You ever even wondered what it’s like not being whole?” “Like somebody we know, you mean?” His head now felt to be swelling with pain, the very skullbone itself. “I reckon I owe you, Johnny.” John Ashley tried to smile. “Ah hell, Bobby, forget it. I aint never been one to call a man’s marker if he’s down on his luck.” Bob Baker’s thumb went into the socket and John Ashley screamed and saw behind the eye a radiant skyrocket burst of red light and then darkness.

TEN February—October 1915

THE DOCTOR WAS A HEAVYSET BEARDED MAN NAMED BOYER. WITH the assistance of a horse-faced nurse called Rachel he worked on John Ashley’s jaw in the narrow confines of an isolation cell of the Palm Beach County Jail. He was able to remove all bullet fragments and was obliged to scrape much less of the shattered jaw than he had thought would be necessary on his initial examination. He set the jawbone, then clamped it with a wire brace, and he put John Ashley on a liquid diet for the next few weeks. He assured him that there would be only a slight perceivable disfigurement to his face once the scars healed. The overall tissue damage had also proved much less severe than it had seemed to Boyer at first sight, though John Ashley’s voice now registered lower than before and his sinuses would evermore trouble him at night and the wound in his hard palate would never heal completely and would occasionally become slightly infected. He had lost but two teeth—a bicuspid and adjoining molar. He awakened with an eyepatch and a burning sensation under it. The doctor was at a loss to explain how the bullet could have done so much damage to the eye, which was outside the trajectory that took the round through the nosebone and palate to lodge in the jaw. He spoke of major trauma to the sclera and cornea and ciliary processes, of the loss of vitreous humor and of massive damage to the retina. John Ashley stared at him with his bloodshot right eye and saw him in a world gone skewed and narrow and he quite suddenly knew that the darkness under the

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eyepatch was greater than human vision could perceive and realized the socket was empty and thats what the doctor was trying to tell him. He had a instant’s vision of Bob Baker’s huge yellow teeth in the moment before his thumb set off the red explosion in his skull. Bob Baker stopped by twice. The first time in the company of Sheriff George, who’d come to notify John Ashley officially that in addition to the charges of murdering Jimmy Gopher and escaping from custody, he now also stood charged for bank robbery and the attempted murder of five police officers. Sheriff George was all business and looked at John Ashley as if he were a stranger. Bob Baker said nothing but stood behind his father and smiled all the while. He looked wellrested. When Sheriff George turned to leave, Bob Baker put a thumb up to his own eye and turned his hand in a sharp corkscrew motion and shut the eye under the thumb and made a face of mock pain. Then he opened both eyes and grinned hard at John Ashley and left. Doctor Boyer watched the whole thing, and when Bob Baker had gone he sighed and shook his head. A week later John Ashley lay on his bunk with his hands behind his head and thought of blind Loretta May and felt closer to her by virtue of his own half-blindness. He recalled the peach smell of her and the freshness of her yellow hair, the pale smoothness of her skin. He was enjoying the feel of the partial erection pressing snug in his pants when he sensed someone at the cell door. He looked over there and saw a pair of shadowed eyes at the small slotted window and even in the dim light he recognized them. “Hey, Bobby,” he said. “How you keepin?” Come on, he thought—step in here for just a minute. The eyes pinched up in deliberation or amusement and a moment later they were gone. He had begun to have dreams now such as he’d never had before. He saw things in his sleep and felt that what he saw was somehow real, though at times he knew too—without knowing how he knew—that what he saw had not yet happened. In one such dream he saw a woman he did not recognize, saw her vaguely. She smelled of the swamp, and under that redolence he caught the scents of her skin and hair and sex as keenly as if she were standing beside him. She seemed to loom over him as a wavering pale figure and he felt the heat of her skin and then her face was right in front of his and still he could not see her clearly but for her green eyes and a tiny gold quarter-moon in the iris of one of them. In another dream he saw Kid Lowe in prison stripes and on a crutch and with a bandaged head, saw him redfaced and shouting and though for some reason he could not hear him he knew somehow that

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the Kid was cursing because he’d been proved right about the bank holding out on them. And so, when Gordon Blue came to visit and told him that the Stuart bankers were crowing to the newspapers about how they’d managed to withhold some ten thousand dollars from the bandits by simply not emptying all the cash drawers into the money bag, John Ashley was both irritated and a little embarrassed but not really surprised. He was permitted no visitors but his lawyer, and Gordon Blue apprised him that the state’s attorney had revived his motion to move his trial for the murder of DeSoto Tiger to Dade County. “I’m playing every ace I’ve got to keep it from happening, Johnny, but I have to tell you the odds aren’t good. They mean to have the trial in Miami come hell or high water.” Gordon Blue told him of Old Joe’s fury on leaning that Bob Ashley had been in on the job after he had expressly forbidden any of his sons but John from acting on it. “I was going over some accounts with your daddy at Twin Oaks when Bob and Kid Lowe showed up and told him what happened. Your daddy was so mad at Bob for being in the holdup he took a strop to him like he was some disobedient child. I couldnt believe Bob would stand for it, but he took off his shirt and leaned against the side of the house like Joe told him to, and Joe let him have it with that strop a good dozen times. I mean, he gave him a hell of a hiding. Some of those welts were thick as your finger. Marked up his whole back all red and purple. Big as he is, Bob might’ve taken that strop away from Joe and beat him with it. It just amazes me that he stood for it.” John Ashley gave Gordon Blue a puzzled look. “Hell, Gordy, what else he gonna do but stand for it? It’s our daddy, man. You dont hit your daddy, he hits you. It’s who a daddy is—the one to hit you when you done wrong. Bob done wrong and he knew it.” Two weeks later the judge granted the state’s motion to have the trial moved to Dade County. Within an hour of the judge’s ruling a rock with a note wrapped around it came crashing through the window of the jail office and so tense were the police in the room that pistols cleared holsters before everyone realized what happened. The note said that if John Ashley wasnt released from jail immediately Sheriff George’s house would be burned to the ground and no matter who might be inside it at the time. It was signed “the Ashley Gang.” Sheriff George sent two armed deputies to keep watch on his house and family and deputized several friends to add to the jail guard force.

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Barely an hour later a county deputy found a note on the seat of his motorcar. It read: “Tell Sheriff George to let johnnie go or perpare to pay the consequences. We mean bisness. The Ashley gang.” Sheriff George affected to shrug it off, but his men could see the anger working in his jaw, the sudden distance in his eyes. He made secret plans with his son Bob and two evenings later and without advance notice to anyone he showed up at the jail a little past midnight and ordered John Ashley brought out of his cell. They manacled his hands behind him and put leg irons on him. They flanked him with guards carrying shotguns and hustled him out into a touring car with tarp covers tied over both sides of the rear of the car and put him in the backseat with two guards. Another guard got in the front with the driver and held a shotgun over the seat with the muzzle within inches of John Ashley’s chest. John Ashley laughed and said, “Goddamn if you boys aint makin me feel like Jesse James.” Sheriff George appeared at the car window and put a finger in John Ashley’s face. “One more word out of you, just one more—and Deputy Bradford’s gonna blow a hole in you big enough to throw a dog through. Go ahead, say something. See if I dont mean it. I had all the trouble from you I aim to stand.” John Ashley could see that Sheriff George was scared and absolutely serious. “He opens his mouth again, Bradford,” Sheriff George said, “it’s the same as trying to escape and I want you to blast him, you understand?” The deputy holding the shotgun on John Ashley said, “Yes-sir.” John Ashley heard Bob Baker laugh somewhere out in the darkness. Sheriff George withdrew from the car and called, “Bobby, you and Freddie lead off. Let’s go.” Bob Baker and Freddie Baker got into a roadster and led the prisoner vehicle out of the jailyard. Sheriff George and another deputy followed in a chattering coupé. They drove to the railroad station and the train was there and waiting. They put John Ashley aboard the baggage car and left the chains on him and put a double lock on the inside of the doors and kept two shotguns trained on him for the entire trip. When the following sunrise broke like bright fire out of the distant rim of the Atlantic Ocean, John Ashley was watching it with his single eye from a barred window of the Dade County Jail. “No,” Old Joe said. “No. There aint gone be no tryin to break him out. It’s just no need for anything risky as that. And hear me good, boy—you write even one more a them notes to George Baker

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and I’m gonna take a grub hoe to your head. You understand? You aint helpin a damn thing with them fucken notes.” “We got to do something, Daddy,” Bob Ashley said. “They beatin on him ever day. They whippin him like a damn dog, whippin him all the time. They spittin in his food, pissin in his coffee. They wont empty his slop pail. You heard about it same as us.” “I heard it from people who dont know the facts of it anymore’n you do.” Old Joe said. “Gordy saw him just yesterday again for about the tenth damn time and you heard him say it aint any of it true. They’re feedin him all right and they aint pissin in his coffe or none of that bullshit. Gordy says he aint got a mark on him but from being shot in the face—and we know it wasnt them who did that, dont we?” He gave Kid Lowe a look and the Kid fixed his gaze on a sparrowhawk in the upper branches of a slash pine. They were seated at a puncheon table alongside the Twin Oaks house—Old Joe and his four unjailed sons and Kid Lowe and Gordon Blue. The woman were at washing clothes in big steaming tin tubs behind the house. The cicadas were loud in the oaks and a great flock of white herons was wingbeating across the purpling sky and past a low orange sun. Mosquitoes keened at the men’s ears. The ripe smells of encroaching summer were on the air: hot wet earth and spawning bluegills and fresh nests of cottonmouths along the waterway banks. “They hittin him where it dont show is why Gordy dont see no marks on him,” Bob said. “They dont clean his cell not give him nothing fit to eat but when Gordy goes to visit.” “How is it you know so much more than everybody else?” Bill Ashley asked. Though he was Old Joe’s chief advisor, it was a rare thing for him to appear at a family council and even rarer for him to speak up at one. When he was in attendance he usually passed the time doodling in a notebook while everyone else did the talking. His brothers sometimes did not see him for weeks at a time. Unlike their own hands and necks, which were burned red-brown by the sun, his had the pallor of indoor life. He wore suspenders and sleeve garters and bow ties and wire-rim spectacles. He never asked any of them to visit his home and none of them had seen his wife but once or twice since the day of his marriage. In some ways he was less familiar to them than Kid Lowe or Gordon Blue. That distance